Without A Net

This is my life

2010-10-20T08:40:00.004-04:00

Sing it Shirley Bassey...

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

Sometimes when I feel afraid, I think of what a mess I've made of my life.

Sometimes when a short but intense relationship ends suddenly and without warning, and all that hope and excitement disappears in an instant, leaving you breathless and temporarily hollow, a lot of other sadness and stress creeps in to fill the vacuum.

Sometimes sleep abandons to you fight the grief and fear until morning.

Sometimes you stand by the banks of the river and wish you weren't such a coward.

Sometimes it takes a 30 mile bike ride out of London.

Sometimes it takes a good friend to tell you the sadness is normal, and that the spectre of your mother is an illusion.

Sometimes you start to realise things about your life, and make important decisions.

This is my life, and I don't give a damn for false emotion.

Today, tomorrow, love will come and find me,
But that's the way that I was born to be.

This is me.

Aliannah and Aleeah (Episode 8)

2010-09-05T11:45:00.003-04:00

Forget romance, the most difficult and complicated relationship must be that between parent and child.

I recently - please don't judge! - have started watching 16 and Pregnant, MTV's reality show about children having to deal with the folliest of youthful follies. It sounds exploitative, and perhaps it is, but what draws me into it episode after episode is the core concept of parenting: the to and fro between love and resentment for a life lost, from longing to frustration. Some kids handle it, some kids don't; semi-frequently the baby is lofted onto the shoulders of an exhausted grandparent in order that life can continue, while in the next episode the teenagers are transformed into loving, responsible adults before our eyes.

I'm not, as those of you who know me personally would guess, drawn to this show because of any inate love for babies or impending broodiness, but rather the tense dance of obligation that makes up the parent/child relationship.

Somewhere on the other side of the ocean, right now, my mother almost certainly lies in a bed, awake and bleary, depression permeating her every pore until her body begins to crumble. It has been this way for years - only recently have I begun to suspect that she may in fact be in control of her health and is playing it for attention and pity. The stakes raise every year: of the 30 illnesses commenly feigned by people with Munchausen Syndrome, she has had 27. In the last year, she has stopped leaving the house, stopped doing her own laundry, stopped everything but caring for her tortoise - the one creature she won't be able to sway with the victim card.

Do I sound angry? Because I am. I'm very angry. I'm angry that this adult woman is choosing frantic, lonely seclusion because it offers quick pay-outs of pity. I'm angry that this woman can have a normal conversation with my brother (who won't put up with her drama) but thinks it is reasonable to leave near-daily messages on my phone moaning and warbling about suicide and desperation and horror. I'm angry that I've not been able to follow my brother's lead and find myself a secluded mountain somewhere on which to hide from her. Faced with a woman who adamently refuses to do anything to help herself, I. am. done.

Except can one ever be done with a parent?

You hear of celebrity children emancipating themselves from their parents - Macauley Culkin springs to mind - and you hear of children raising themselves successfully when the parents have fallen through or passed away, so I hardly think the active role of parent is a sacred thing. Love is not mandatory or a given, nor is loyalty or selflessness or devotion. In fact, the only thing that seems assured, be it positive or negative, is an unshakeable sense that the parent and the child are doomed to be connected forever, come what may. Even the friends of mine happily adopted to loving parents wonder sometimes about the people who brought them into the world. A colleague seethes resentment towards her lifelong absentee father, and the painful spectre of another friend's estranged brother was palpable when her father gave the welcome to the groom speech on behalf of the family.

That umbilical cord never seems to fully disappear. In many families it is a beautiful thing - an unspoken agreement that at least one person will love you unconditionally, always. In others, it is painful bondage to someone who you would rather walk away from.

My mother is seriously mentally ill and refuses treatment, and as a result has played almost no positive role in my life for years. Visit with her are week-long ordeals in which I am told in alternating moments how I am all she has and how I am a terrible, manipulative, horrible person. I do not like her, and wonder often if what I describe as love is really nothing more than filial obligation. As the months pass, my mountain hideaway beckons with increasing fervour.

In movies, mothers swear to newborn babes that they will love them and protect them forever.

In 16 and Pregnant, mothers look down a oily-eyed aliens and wonder what they've done. There is nothing solid about the relationship, nothing taken for granted except that it's going to be difficult and it's going to be complicated.

I guess I identify.

Psssst! Carrot!

2010-07-30T15:18:00.009-04:00

Back home, many many years ago, my then-boyfriend Lance once sighed piteously and said, "If redheads knew their power, they would rule the earth."

Sadly for poor Lance, I wasn't yet a redhead when we dated, giving in the titian temptation mere months after our breakup. I've been red ever since, though, and it fits my personality and my self-identity so well that I frequently am surprised to see roots.

In Canada, red would turn a few heads. In Mexico, red made me an exotic goddess. In Britain... in Britain I have contemplated going blonde.

Britain, oh Britain! Seriously, what is your problem with the copper tops?

This is the hair colour I've been using for the past year - Nice and Easy Shade #108:

Recently, Clairol did a redesign of their box - not the product inside, just the box - and came out with this:

Weyhey, see what they did there?

This change was so significant that on three separate occasions did I stand in front of the wall of colours and think, "crap, they've stopped producing any reds!"

The bastards.

I would never go so far as to say I have experienced any gingerphobia here (although I'm hardly the carrot-haired and blonde-lashed redhead that tends to get the brunt of that). What I've witnessed is much more subtle: the depiction of an unattractive person as a redhead, debate over whether "Kick a Ginger Day" was hate speech or a good laugh, the entire slurry connotation of the word "Ginger." Most interesting of all is in St Paul's Cathedral, where a pre-apple Eve is a blonde and her cowering post-apple self is a vibrant redhead.

But why, Britain? What is the logic behind your pigmentism?

Some facts, thanks to Google:

In the Middle Ages, redheads and be-freckled folk were burnt at the stake for being witches. The Spanish Inquisition went so far as to equate the red colour with the fires of hell - proof of the woman's inherent evil.

A hundred years or so later, hair from a redheaded man was one of the key ingrediants of poison.

In reality, redheads on average require 20% more anaethesia to be sedated, and are prone to waking up during surgery.

Redheads go white, rather than grey, and tend do so much later than other hair colours.

Romans sold their red-headed slaves for more than all the others.

Aristotle didn't like redheads, considering them "emotionally not housebroken."

There is some evidence to suggest bees prefer stinging redheads.

On New Year's Eve, if the first person through your door is a redhead, you will have terrible luck all year. (Brunettes mean good luck, and blondes mean nada.)

Only 4% of the world are natural redheads, and that number is dropping. Fast.

And, my favourite Google factoid: "A French Proverb states that “redheaded women are either violent or false, and usually are both.” Ha!

For every creepy ginger kid, there is Vincent van Gogh.
For every ginger nerd, there is Winston Churchill.
For every unstable sexpot, there is an Elizabeth I.
For every "redheads are gross," there is a Gemma Ward, a Rita Hayworth, an Ann Margret, a Botticelli's Venus, row upon row of fetish mags, a Jessica Rabbit.

I don't get it.

Thoughts?

(P.S. I'm not going blonde. I love my hair, damn it.)

One is the loneliest number

2010-07-22T07:48:00.002-04:00

Nearly half my life ago, my then-boyfriend and I came up with a theory: that Hollywood romcoms are to women what pornography is to men, in that both create artificial and potentially destructive expectations of the opposite gender. It's not love, ladies, if the Empire State Building doesn't light up when he kisses you for the first time.

Now, most of us are smarter than that, and most of us are perfectly well aware that relationships take hard work and communication and patience.

I think.

See, I don't know. I mean, I vaguely remember that being true.

I had my first serious boyfriend at 16 year old - we dated for a year and half and loved well and parted with a ground-shaking amount of hurt and anger.

I dated my military boy for three years from 19 to 22, and then from 24 to 26 dated my academic.

And that's about where the serious relationships end. Oh, sure, there have been romantic trysts and traumas in between, but serious relationships? relationships with potential and with love and with that lovely worn-jeans comfort and ease? I peaked on those nearly a decade ago.

I have no lack of love in my life, but I have a serious lack of Love.

Does this bother me?

And, if so, why does it bother me?

Next year, at the ripe old age of 35, I shall be classed as a spinster. According to legal lingo, I am already a spinster, and a spinster "without issue" no less. Poor unmarried, childless thing.

This didn't bother me in the slightest until very recently. I was quite comfortable with the fact that my life decisions - moving every three years, living in Mexico - were not those of someone who sought the white picket fence and plastic-wrapped furniture life. In lieu of Love, I would have pub crawls in Edinburgh and sushi nights in Toronto and mariachis in Mexico - fair deal.

When my brother got married to his remarkable wife, and they produced their first remarkable baby, I actually felt a palpable sense of relief that the pressure was off me. I was, I think, about 27 at this time. I didn't envy their diapers and marital rows, not when the world was at my fingertips.

And then. A few months ago, my dad asked me to write a little blurb about myself on the website for a massive family reunion involving all descendents of my paternal grandfather and his siblings. He had already written his, my dad, which read something along the lines of, "[My dad] is awesomely successful and happy. His son Paul is married to the amazing lady and they have two amazing children. His daughter Erika is the world traveller."

Huh, I thought to myself. World traveller. Well, I suppose that's not a bad label, is it?

And then I read the rest of the profiles:

My cousin Kim (two years older than me) is married with a beautiful son.
My cousin Bryan (one year younger than me) is getting married in two weeks.
My cousin Lindsay (five-ish years younger than me) just got married.
My cousin Erin (eight-ish years younger than me) is getting married in October.
My cousin Jess (about the same age as Erin) is getting married this fall.
My cousin Kelly (got to be a decade younger) is getting married and becoming a stepmother.

The doubt and fear started almost immediately, like that dream we all have wherein you are about to take your final exam but you've not been to class all year: dread washing over, trying to figure out how you can turn back time.

World travelling is awesome but it's awfully chilly company on a cold winter's night, and it really sucks at taking care of you when you're ill or ageing. When I come home from a tough day at the office, world travelling rarely takes me in its arms and reminds me I'll get through this too. And when I received news of my bonus and raise yesterday, world travelling didn't really care (mostly because debt, the close companion to world travelling, was excited enough for both).

I am suddenly shudderingly aware of what I don't have in my life, and scared that it may never come to me.

But!

Wanting to be partnered up is only one part of this issue. The fear and the desperation and the sorrow that is accompanying that desire can only be attributed to Meg Ryan and Reese Witherspoon.

For years now I have been taught that Love is something that comes to you when you're young and beautiful, and it's easy and full of radiant sunbeams and twittering bluebirds when it's right. Maxim tells me men only want girls when they're taut and young and droopy-eyelidded; Sex and the City tells me I should be in my raging prime right now, ravishing handsome boytoys every other evening.

As the years roll along, as they are wont to do, and my body begins it's rightful descent into soft, pendulous, imperfect yet flawless age, I am being hammered with messages that it's too late for me, that my life never caught up to what was expected of it, that the Empire State Building will never shatter into light for me. Meg is the perfect example of this: America's sweetheart when she was in her twenties, now she's in her fourties and can you think of the last time that pitiful, duck-lipped woman was depicted as a love interest? Age is prohibitive to love, Hollywood indirectly screams! And so are independence and experience, whispers Playboy.

But do you know what I think is even less attractive than jiggly bits? Rabid, misdirected, frantic, self-destructive, terrified desperation.

I am bursting with love, with the need to give and receive love. My fingers ache to tousle someone's hair. My arms ache to embrace another. My soul aches to know that it is not alone.

But I refuse to be defined by my lack of love, and to equate being single with being alone, even if every fibre of my body wants to believe it so.

Monkey feet

2010-06-08T07:29:00.001-04:00

I have Morton’s Syndrome, a fairly common feature in which the second (and in my case, third) toe is longer than the big toe. My toes are so long that I regularly joke that I am most three generations away from being able to hang from a tree branch by my feet.

I’m not particularly bothered by my monkey toes, to be honest. We live in peace. They are my toes, my toes are me. They can be found on my mental list of “things that are perhaps imperfect about Erika but which don’t really bother her,” as opposed to either the “things Erika likes about herself” or the “things Erika loathes about herself” cousin lists.

Two weeks ago, I wasn’t really conscious that such lists existed, not until my stepmother reacted with unabated horror when I rejected a pair of peep-toe sandals on the grounds that it was my second toe that was doing the peeping. Again, there was no self-loathing to my logic - just, as I saw it, pure fact.

“Why do you care?!?” she wailed at me the next afternoon. “Why does it matter?!?”

And it doesn’t matter (not my toes at least) in as much as my toes are concerned. I swear it doesn’t.

But there is an underlying horrible truth her: I am aware of my TOES. My toes! And not just my toes, but my entire body, at all times, and my job and my social life and my relative success in the game of life. My brain is the synaptic equivalent of a room full of pre-schoolers hopped up on candy necklaces. If I could harness the energy I spend on micro analysis in a typical day and direct it elsewhere, I could cure cancer and the Middle East crisis by Friday.

I am a massive overthinker. “But!” as I told Lorna that afternoon, “I’m better than most of my friends!”

Which is also true, and very very sad.

An exceptionally beautiful friend was in town this weekend, and, like in some reliable social chemistry experiment, the addition of one female to one female produced a four-day gluttonous rampage of our – and everyone else’s – imperfections. Bushy hair, limp hair, wide calves, soft stomachs, grey hair, neck folds, inner things, jagged toes, aging hands, saggy breasts, cellulite, bad tans, body hair, uncut fingernails, dandruff, bad teeth, yellow teeth, crooked teeth, bad plastic surgery, good plastic surgery, too many muscles, broad shoulders, red bumps, dry skin, under-eye shadows, veins, clothes clothes clothes.

And dearie me, people, but this is one stunning girl spewing out this tirade of self-hate. Conventionally and uniquely beautiful all at once: creamy skin, brilliant blue eyes, all slender curves and radiant youth and health.

I got sensitive at one point: when she pointed out that one girl’s calves were a bit too wide for her legs to be considered “gorgeous,” I whipped out my mental tape measure and did a loop around my calves, falling silent and sad for most of the rest of the night. My calves moved from “not bothered”, to “things Erika loathes about herself” – I hadn’t previously thought of them as anything other than slightly-wide calves that fit relatively well with the rest of my frame, but now they stood in the way of my having gorgeous legs.

The agenda of crippling narcissism currently plaguing Western womenfolk (and, increasingly, menfolk) is serious stuff, and is not to be underestimated. You can find it discussed in women’s magazines, flanked by an advertisement for skin cream and an article on Scarlett Johansson’s breasts. We buy bathing suits because they flatter our figures, and shampoo because it makes our hair shiny. Sex and the City based six seasons and two movies on dissecting the daily minutia of women’s lives, in groups, over martinis. We are not allowed to be perfect yet we are not allowed to be imperfect, and always always always must we THINK ABOUT IT.

If we could harness the energy spent on micro-analysis by all women worldwide in a typical day and direct it elsewhere, we would learn how to fly.

In the first chapter of the book that, simplified and glossed over, produced the magic that is the movie The Princess Bride, William Goldman discusses Princess Buttercup’s efforts to become the most beautiful woman in the world. At the beginning of the chapter, she is perhaps sixth, but, with such polishings as slimming down one elbow and fattening up the other, she finds herself at the top of the ranks.

Goldman was being facetious when he wrote this, reflecting on the culture of ridiculousness that is the eternal question for feminine perfection. That beautiful Buttercup should feel held back by one slightly pudgy elbow is hilarious, truly – as delicious as the six-fingered man and the Rodents of Unusual Size.

Last night, I made note of soft, tiny folds above my elbows. Another jot on my “imperfect but not bothered” list.

I am sad for myself, for my beautiful friend, for the women I know, that we wade through the world with such enormous albatrosses on our backs, forever doing penance for crimes against industry-created ideals of perfection. And if that bird weighs too much, if that bird holds us back, if that bird keeps us down, well, we have no one to blame but our own brainwashed, trapped, crippled selves. We buy into this, we perpetuate it, we allow it to consume us whole.

We can stop hurting ourselves and each other.

We must stop hurting ourselves and each other.

We are in control, damn it.

We are in control.

2010-03-04T09:04:00.002-05:00

Little blog, little blog, remember me?

It's been a long time, little blog. I wasn't sure if you'd recognise me anymore. I really don't look that different, to be fair, but I feel different. Otis Redding was right: the change may be a long time coming, but it eventually will come.

The world is small and life is beautiful, little blog. We fight our usual battles unceasingly, expecting that age will somehow make us wise enough to rise above it all. This month it's no carbs, last month it's money worries, and before it was the fickleness of friendship, the pain of spurned love, the frustration of ill health, and so it continues, loop-dee-loo, life chugging along.

We are - I am - on a quest for love, for acceptance, for challenge, for reward, for survival.

We are - I am - slowly, surely, winning.

This is not goodbye, little blog. I've really missed you. I'll be back soon, I promise, with tea and biscuits this time.

Not a light post, this one...

2009-10-21T10:34:00.002-04:00

This may be controversial.

This past Sunday, my lovely Anna and I went to the Imperial War Museum, finishing an emotionally-exhausting day at the Holocaust Memorial Exhibit. It was the the first such exhibit I'd ever been to, and I reacted pretty much as one would expect to react when faced with images of bulldozers plowing towers of emaciated corpses into a ditch. I left in shaky tears.

But I have to confess something: my tears were not because of history.

In the western world at least, we hold up the atrocities committed by the Nazi party as the absolute pinnacle of human inhumanity. How could the German people - they who gave us Nietzsche and Goethe and Johann Sebastian Bach - allow such a thing to happen? Why did so few people DO anything?

Anna, who is German, described how it is illegal to display a swastika in Germany - even in a historical context, such as the one painted on the original aircraft hanging from the roof of the museum. German war dead are not allowed to be honoured: the 17 year old conscripted to the front line is just as evil as Goering. As children, they have shame and guilt pummelled into them for the crimes of their parents and grandparents.

This bothers me. It bothers me because I don't agree that that 17 year old conscript is the same as the masterminds. It bothers me more that, by focusing on the condemning of the slaughter of 12 million people by one group of people, we appear to be fooling ourselves that it was an isolated incident that we are all somehow better than.

I was in tears when I left the Holocaust Memorial on Sunday not because of Auswitz but because of England. And the US. And Canada. Andandandandandand.

1930s era anti-Jewish propanda described Jews as a pestilence, destroying the very fabric of German society. They were flooding into Germany, taking over, spreading poverty and sin. They spat in the face of German custom and tradition, threatened the very existence of the German people.

In the exhibit, we all clucked our tongues and shook our heads at the horror of it all. Imagine! Such ignorance!

Just now, a comment on an article about the expected spike in the population of England due to immigration states: "This will be the end of Britishness as we know it. Pressure is already on us to describe Christmas as something else and we become more and more like America every day. The problem is that we all have to live and work together and we have already seen the spread of ghettos around the country around the country and are constantly reading of the problems they create. I cannot understand why people want to come here to improve their life and then immediately try to impose the habits and cultures of the land they had left behind on us."

In the same article, an anonymous commenters fights back: "I'm an immigrant! I came here not being able to speak a word of English. I managed to get straight As throughout high school and am in my penultimate year of a law degree, thank you very much. Celebrate diversity! We're not here to be clones of one another." That comment currently has a rating of -162, which is almost 20 lower than when I first read it 15 minutes ago.

A third commenter on another article takes it there: "This is frightening. Thanks to this government we, the indigenous population are being overwhelmed. It must be brought to an end now!" (Comment score: +72) The other 400 commenters agree, with only two exceptions. There is mass agreement on these boards that the British National Party should be voted in at the next election.

(Caveat: I am not exactly referring to The Guardian here, and I am guessing - hoping - that the average reader of the publications from which I have gathered these quotes are a vocal minority. That being said, I'm not sure how confident I am that the minority is so small. Back in the 90s, when I lived in the north, I often heard people talk about the "Paki" overflow and how "those people only look out for themselves." And a dear friend recently told me that "not a single Muslim spoke up against September 11th." And a colleague told me she would never wear traditional Indian clothes to work because it wasn't worth the hassle. So.)

We need to wake the hell up. There is something really scary going on and we are all too busy patting ourselves on the back for not being Hitler to notice it.

The way the media and the man on the street talks about Muslims today is almost verbatim to those propaganda posters in the Holocaust Memorial exhibit. It is a very VERY find line between what those evil Nazis were saying and what these ignorant Daily Mail assholes are saying. The Muslim world overwhelmingly believes that they are under attack from the West because THEY ARE. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of us. And this wave of hate flowing from both sides - Us and Them, who's the evil one? - has the potential to lead to another memorial exhibit.

It only takes a couple good, strong catalysts, you know? If greasy, chinless Hitler and his crew of overweight/limping/almost blind generals can lead an educated, philosophical nation into pursuing an ideal of broad-shouldered blonde health, someone else WILL come along eventually to light a fire on one side or the other.

I don't believe we have learned from the Holocaust. I do believe it could happen again, if the people wanting to do it could somehow subvert the all-seeing eye of the internet. I am quite confident right now that it WILL happen again, in some way, and that we may very well be witnessing the early stages right now.

And THAT is worth crying over.

Feels like home to me

2009-09-10T06:23:00.004-04:00

My laminate list has, for some time, remained constant: Alan Cumming, Javier Bardem, Robert Downey Jr., Hank Azaria and Gary Oldman. (Me? Type? NAH.)

(For those not in with the lingo: a laminate list is that list of five celebrities you're "allowed" to sleep with if you get the chance, regardless of your marital status. I used to call it the Five Exceptions list, but stole the concept of the list being laminated off a sitcom. It's alliteralicious.)

On Sunday night, I went to see the closing night of Mr. Cumming's one-man vaudeville show here in London's glittering west end. I laughed and I whooped and I yelled Falsettos! and Chess!, and at intermission I bought the cd being hawked in the hallway because his love song to his husband was still ricocheting around in my head and my soul. I was totally charmed by his mischevious impishness, all the while contemplating an article I had read years ago in which he had admitted that his stage persona was a complete act and wondering who the real Alan Cumming was, were there clues in the songs he had chosen?

It was a fun show and a good night up to that point, but then wonders of wonders, my friend Meg realizes she knows Alan Cumming's collaborator - the lovely and talented Mr. Lance Horne - from band camp back in the day. Before you can say "Erika's head explodes into a reddish puff of total cellular happiness," we've been invited to the wrap party.

On the way, we get to talking about laminate lists and celebrities we'd like to meet, and Meg mentions that the one actor that would cause her head respectively to explode would be Stephen Ouimette, a Canadian stage legend that I also just happened to have done Oliver with back in 1993. I tell her this. She is amazed. I am a bit amazed in turn that sweet, down-to-earth, salt of the earth Stephen could arouse such fan frenzy. Not that he isn't deserving of it, to be fair, because the man is stupidly talented, only that he's... well, he's Stephen!

And then I meet Alan. It takes me all evening to work up the courage to talk to him, though my stomach makes great leaps for freedom every time I catch sight of him sitting right. over. there. But, swallowing the nerves, I saunter over and I say something devastatingly, utterly cool like: "Um, Alan? Hi, um, yeah. We met earlier. Um, I've been trying to think of something to say all evening, something that would be interesting to YOU, but I have nothing, so I just wanted to say that your show was great and you are great and I have adored you since Cabaret and look, I bought your cd, can I have a picture with you?"

Hey look! Erika's a fangirl!

He was lovely - he signed my cd and showed me the picture of his dogs and hugged me hard when I told him he was on my laminate list (because THAT is not at all a weird and uncomfortable to say to someone: "hi! did you know I'm allowed to sleep with you?"). He was truly truly lovely. As I was leaving, he kissed my cheek and I blushed for an hour afterwards.

But now, five days later, I'm all skeeved out by my behaviour. Why was that necessary? Since when do I need proof of an encounter in the form of a photo?

Worse is the realization that, 16 years ago, my friend's dream-date was "Oh, Stephen..." to me, and now I'm just one of the great unwashed, the great squeeing fangirls who lose all sight of the fact that Stephen Ouimette, Alan Cumming, Graham Norton (who was sitting in our row) - these are just people, normal people, doing a job that just happens to put them in the public eye. Four years after leaving theatre as a career, I am reduced to breathing deeply in the presence of the gilded few, trying to absorb a little of their stardust in order to validate my reality as a person, a normal person, doing a job that just happens to have me stuck behind a desk.

In another world, in a world where I had the intestinal fortitude to withstand the ego blows of being a theatre producer, Alan Cumming and I may have crossed paths professionally. And then I could have smiled as I recalled somesuch witty thing we said that night when we did the thing, and we both would have looked at each other as people and laughed about it as people. Or perhaps we wouldn't have met before, but we'd have met on Sunday as fellow professionals, and we could've chatted about the people we know in common (we do know people in common, actually) and what we're working on and do that theatre-thing of "darling, we HAVE to have coffee and discuss that project, you'd be PERFECT for it." No squeeing, no celebrity, no false expectations.

I love my job and my life here in London, so none of this is to be taken as Erika contemplating a return to her previous incarnation. It's just that, Sunday evening, surrounded by wardrobe mistresses and actors and musicians, shmoozing and networking and sharing trench stories, I was a fish let loose into water for a few minutes. And, from the outside, looking in, it felt more like home than ever.

Hey Alan, good show. I have a script I'm working on again, finally, after years of letting it sit dead in my harddrive. Let's do lunch sometime, hey?

The glass wall

2009-08-26T08:21:00.006-04:00

There were times when the immense different-ness of Mexico got to me. Continually fighting your long-developed patterns and expectations can be exhausting and, yes, upsetting. I would become exhausted, irritable, snapping at everyone around me for having the audacity to speak Spanish or insist on tortillas with dinner.

Two weeks ago, now safely ensconced in the cultural familiarity of my own country's motherland, I became exhausted, irritable, snapping at everyone around me for having the audacity to analyze their food intake for caloric content or comment on my hair's shrivelled ends.

It took me a few days to put the two experiences together. That I could be experiencing culture shock in a country so very like my own seemed an impossibility to me, yet there it was, clear as day, Erika hits the culture wall like a ton of bricks.

My mother has a saying, paraphrased here as I don't know the exact quote: "Pity they who leave home past the age of twenty, for they shall belong nowhere." My mom relates to this quote as, having met my father in Paris in her early 20s, she moved to Canada at aroundabout 24 and now spends her days wildly contemplating her Scandinavian home with utopian awe. She doesn't feel Canadian, because she is Swedish, yet she knows she would feel anything but Swedish were she to return, having spent almost 40 years now in Canada. A soul lost in the purgatorial inbetween of our small world after all.

I'm not sure I agree with that. I have lived, in order but avoiding duplicates, in: Edmonton (Canada), Uppsala (Sweden), Ottawa (Canada), Edinburgh (Scotland), Leeds (England), Toronto (Canada), Mexico City (Mexico) and now this monstrous wonder that is London. And, in contrast to my mother who belongs nowhere, I belong EVERYWHERE.

It is to my very great delight that I realize that my current bout of culture shock is not coming from a Canadian in London, but rather a Canadian accustomed to the life and priorities of Mexico now living in London. In some way, I am tri-cultural, perhaps more.

It is my learned Mexican-ness - a Mexican-ness that I never took the liberty to assume had absorbed into me - that rebels against Britain's obsession for deconstructing every little thing to point out its good and bad elements. Life in Mexico means having more important things to think about than what it the sugar content on that package of tomatoes (which are wrapped here oh-so-carefully to avoid any bruising or blemishing), or whether my hair is having an adverse reaction to British hard water. No Mexican ever looked at me at me and mused whether my wardrobe was pub- or club-worthy.

No, in Mexico the biggest concern was personal safety or money. Who cares what blouse you're wearing if you're going to get mugged on the way to club, you know? (Not that I was ever mugged, not in three long years, for the record...) Who cares about a split end as long as you have money for groceries?

And, okay, sure, I am aware that a large percentage of Mexicans perceive a connection between skin colour and opportunity, a white is right, a pale is... good...

And, okay, sure, that was a struggle I never had to deal with, or, perhaps, inherently benefited from to an unknown degree, as my skin is the colour of skim milk: so pale I am vaguely blue.

It is, therefore, extremely possible that Juan Mexico spends far more time deconstructing his freckles than I was ever aware of. I leave ample room for being schooled in this regard.

But one thing I can tell you is that, in three beautiful years, I, personally, lost the habit of deconstructing every damn thing.

(My ex-roommate will choke on his milk here. Seriously, P, I did. What you saw there? Was BETTER. Was calm. Was laissez-faire, anything goes, living my life kind of freedom, really it was.)

And, people, in the absence of all those nudges and pokes and whispers and hints, the amount of work I got done on sorting out the junk closet that is my heart, mind and soul was impressive. I left Mexico in May ready to be Happy Erika, Positive Erika, Moving Forward Erika, Erika 2.0. I was going to burst into the world as a radiant sunbeam of love and light, anti-perspirated against the small stuff. It was going to be a blinding, spectacular definition of self as the very best self I could be.

It hasn't worked.

And it's not that I'm not happy or positive or moving forward, it's that, all of a sudden, I have noticed that moving forward is much, much more difficult. It is slogging forward, fighting upstream against a massive, culturally-created swamp-river of over-analysis and self-destructiveness.

I don't care about the sugar content in my tomatoes!!! They're tomatoes!!!!!!

I don't care about the calories in my cottage cheese!!! Or my curry!!! Or my ice cream!!!

I am not a better person when I'm going to Fitness First every day!!!

The pressure to pick apart is staggering. The continual stream of comments I hear from those around me is irritating. The pressure to re-link my breakfast foods and which neighbourhood I live in to my personal self-worth us unrelenting. Life is very easy here, you see, so people have the luxury or worrying about the DUMBEST FLIPPING THINGS!

AAARGH!!!

I am experiencing a bit of culture shock.

And, damn it, I refuse to concede the distance gained. Bring out the tequila, ladies and gents, I'm going upstream.

London calling

2009-08-05T09:28:00.003-04:00

I may well have to change the name of this blog to "Who Needs a Net?" in a cheap tactic to shake off the fear conveyed by the original name without having to change the URL.

It's been two months of London life now, having stepped, bleary and ecstatic, off the plane at Gatwick Airport on 2 June. Mexico I said a mostly-dry-eyed goodbye to two weeks earlier, tearing a path across Canada in a vain attempt to see everyone and do everything in ten days following.

Two months. Wow.

I look back on Mexico now in much the same way that I reflect back on love affairs long run their course - with great warmth and fondness, yet with a sense of gentle finality. Mexico has not left me, oh no: I listen to Cafe Tacuba and Mono Blanco on my iPod regularly, and lustily translate the lyrics of Paquita la del Barrio to anyone who shows the faintest curiousity, and I have on more than one occasion been nearly consumed by a craving for a tamal or pozole. I look at pictures of tiny turtles and mountain paths and grinning friends with roaring gratitude that that country, those people, took me in and allowed me to share their culture, their history, their reality with me. Ah! It makes me catch my breath just to think of it all. What did I ever do to deserve such an experience?

London was a tougher sell. In the weeks after receiving the job offer in London, I frequently heard some variation on the same refrain: "London! You must be so excited!"

I wasn't.

Not really.

It wasn't anything against London per se - one of the great cities of the world, yadda yadda yadda - as much as it was that London felt just too damn much like home after three years in the sublime surrealism of Mexico. London would be my language, my history, and, as a colonist, something very similar to my culture. I'd grown up with Fawlty Towers and Yes Minister, I'd lived in Edinburgh and Leeds, I'd been called Erik-er by my English grandmother my entire life - how was London going to surprise me?

London has surprised me.

London has enthralled me.

If Mexico is the nostalgic reminiscences of a past love, London is the dashing new love on my doorstep with a bouquet of sunflowers and a poem he composes off the top of his head.

London is random blue plaques on historical points of interest that most other countries would write operas about, but which London, in its oversaturation, can only be bothered to notate half-heartedly.

London is eating lunch beside Tower Bridge, mightly dismantling the glass skyscrapers on the north side of the river in my mind to reveal the city that Elizabeth I would have known.

London is attempting to look suave and undeterred by the heat and the crowds on the Tube in the morning, cheerily fanning myself with my tube pass and counting how many stops to go.

London is getting off a Canada Day cruise up the Thames and **sha-BAM!** there is Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. (Well, ok, fine, the third construction of it, but STILL...)

London has won me over. I am madly, passionately in love with this city. Head over heels in love with this city. Filled up by this city in a way that no city has filled me up before.

I am happy.

I am so incredibly, indescribably, undeniably lucky, and so very very full of love and gratitude right now.

Mea culpa

2009-04-28T14:49:00.002-04:00

I just finished reading an article on how they still don’t know why the swine flu is killing people in Mexico City, while victims in the US and Canada are taking two aspirin and going to work in the morning. There are theories, but no one knows for sure.

Except me. I know EXACTLY why this virus is centered in Mexico City.

And it has nothing to do with the city’s alleged lack of sanitation (other than not being able to drink the tap water and wishing recycling was a bit more common, I have no complaints) or lack of health care (private hospitals in Mexico have world class health care, and the Universidad Nacional Autonomo de Mexico is one of the few hospitals globally recognized by the World Health Organization).

No, the problem is me.

It’s my fault.

See, my family has this history of leaving trouble in our wake. The most recent wave of the Middle East conflict exploded mere weeks after my dad and stepmother visited Israel. They also forewarned the shooting of tourists in Egypt – to the extent that they had brunched into the hotel the day before militants burst in and killed everyone – and my father had a leisurely walk through Tiananmen Square in weeks prior. It’s also possible that the tsunami in Indonesia was their fault, although I’m not completely sure of the dates of their visit.

I’ve had better luck, in that disasters seem to happen to cities I love once I’m long gone. I fell in love with New York in 2000, New Orleans in 2002, and was contemplating returning to a life in London in 2005. (Edinburgh, luckily, has remained untouched. So far...)

But (and I am loath to admit this but it’s necessary to admit this for the story arc), I’ve always been mildly peeved that I never actually got to be involved in anything noteworthy. I didn’t want to be in the World Trade Centers by any means, but I listened to the stories of my friends in New York City, about how they had been affected and changed by the events of that sunny Tuesday, and I felt a pang of jealousy that my life was so darn boring.

(That sounds even worse now that I’ve written it down.)

Now, preparing to leave yet another city I’ve grown immensely, I cautioned my friends. Things happen when I leave, I said. I’ve been keeping you safe as long as I’ve been here, I warned. This city is due for a major earthquake or something, and it’ll happen after I leave. I am a precursor to doom!, I bellowed.

But, silly Erika, how long will it take you to learn not to taunt the universe? You wished out loud that you weren't stuck with your homicidal cat for another 15+ years; mere weeks later he died from eating string. You wished you had an ulcer like your friend's to excuse you from class for a few weeks; a couple months later you were in the hospital having abdominal surgery for an angry gall bladder. You wished for something exciting happen to the city you were in; now you're weeks away from starting your awesome new dream job in London and the British Embassy is holding your passport hostage and they're talking about shutting down the airports and refusing people coming from Mexico.

See, it's my fault. It was bound to happen anyway, given my family's curse, but I challenged the universe to do it sooner! now! make life interesting already!

And it did.

Sorry about that, everyone. When the food runs out and the zombies are at the door, feel free to throw me to them first.

Blame Canada

2009-04-25T09:59:00.002-04:00

Look, I know I'm preaching to a converted audience of about six here, but I have to say something about Canadians, Mexico and the pig flu.

I get a lot of harrassment from a fellow Canadian at work because I refuse to perpetuate the stereotype of Canada as a land of shiny happy people without racism, homophobia, sexism or crime. See, the thing is, I love my country and I'm a proud Canadian, but I would attribute the majority of our socially liberal laws like gay marriage (permitted country-wide, no restrictions, no special word just for them) more to the typical Canadian impulse to choose human rights over personal beliefs rather than any assumption that any significantly larger percentage of the population actually believes gay marriage is "right" or "moral" or "doesn't make you sick to your stomach at the very thought of two men together."

Canada has a really great Public Relations department and, other than periodically bashing around a couple of doe-eyed baby seals, we've emerged virtually pristine in the world's eye. And this bothers me on some level because, while I do think Canada is a pretty awesome country in which to live, pretending that we're all friends and the sky is always blue and the birds always sing will not actually provide us with a forum to address the rampant poverty in Kapuskasing, the children going without breakfast, the gay teen being beaten in the parking lot on the way home, the tall young black man in a suit being harrassed by the police even though I told them the guy was a short, middle-aged Latino in jeans. We need to face the reality in order to fix it.

Which brings me to the pig flu.

Mexico, as I'm sure you're all aware aware now, is in the middle of a media frenzy about a possible pandemic of a flu derived from pigs that has to date left just over 60 people dead. In an attempt to stop the spread of the virus/look busy, yesterday the government shut down all schools and universities, movie theatres and auditoriums, and placed police in the metro to snag anyone that looked a bit queasy. Today, Saturday, the World Health Organization (WHO) is having an emergency meeting to decide whether to raise the global pandemic rating from 3 (impending) to 4 (in progess), 5 (holy crap) or 6 (aim for the head) - a raise that would mean closing the borders, canceling flights, etc. Even more piteously, this weekend two football games will be played to (intentionally) completely empty stadiums lest one sneeze set off a wave of illness.

Canada's media, in what I have come to see as a very Canadian desperate to share the attention related to a crisis, have started publishing articles with titles such as "Assumed Swine Flu in Ontario" (summary: there is no actually evidence that there are any cases of pig flu in Ontario but, given how many Ontarians visit Mexico in an average winter, maybe, just maybe, we'll be lucky enough to have a case soon!) and "Fear Grows in Mexico" (summary: we have very few new details of any note but apocalyptic fearmongering sells!).

And the commenters are ready, mouse in hand, to unleash some of the most hateful, xenophobic bullshit I have read in a long time:

Suprize....suprize ??? Didn't they just run a story on the water being turned off around Mexico City.....lack of sanitation possibly ???? Small wonder a DoomsDay plague popped up so fast

I'm wondering why the Mexican Authorities did not sound the alarm earlier? Why did it take a diagnosis from the United States and Canada (people returning from Mexico) to ring those alarm bells?

Your country is too dangerous for me - too many uninvestigated deaths, unlawful imprisonments, murders of innocents in the name of drug crimes - none of my Canadian dollars for you, and I remind every Canadian who wants to visit of the same. Clean up your house before you invite visitors.

I swear I could have mistaken those theives for people trying to avoid the flu ...

Mexico should be a No Fly Zone for all Canadians. Screw Harper's Free Trade deals.

How many Canadians have been murder in or around MEXICO, now thiers a disease, that can be brought back to CANADA. I believe if plants ,animals, foods have to be in Quaritine, why aren't HUMANS? Who in thier right mind pays people to murder them and now diseases, what wrong with our government?

Mexico city is the same size as the population of Canada & It has questionable sanitary practices. It was only a matter of time before a new strain made its way into the human population. Hmm, makes you wonder what the hell they are doing with pigs down there.

I'm still going to Mexico City...too b honest I'm more worried about getting shot by some crack addict trying to steal my wallet than this

The fact that your wife travels to Mexico for work tells quite a bit about how sheltered you are.
Mexico = cheap vacations
Mexio = cheap labour
Mexico = infested with crime, drugs and corruption
you get my drift right?

And so on. I can't even continue going through the comment boards, sorry. I'm only a few pages into the responses on ONE SINGLE ARTICLE to get the above comments.

What I find so amazing about this stream of hatred towards Mexico and Mexicans is that, prior to coming here, I don't think I knew we had a problem. I remember seeing a Saturday Night Live sketch in which two men performing in a politically incorrect cabaret entered in sombreros and ponchos and sang, "I don't want to work, I only want to siesta," and I was mildly confused. My understanding was that Canadians just didn't know much about Mexico - cactus and beans and burros - but at the most thought Mexico to be kind of sweet and undeveloped (think the little town in The Three Amigos) - we were ignorant, sure, but not hostile. Speedy Gonzalez was my favourite cartoon character growing up, damn it!

When did we develop this fanatic racism against Mexico?

And, to make things worse, it's undoubtedly the same people who wailed and gnashed their teeth and shook their fists at the sky when the international media were expounding the Real and Terrible Danger of Toronto during the SARS outbreak in 2003. The international fear was pumped up to such a tremendous degree that Toronto spent years trying to dig its assassinated economy out of the ground. Now, faced with a very similar situation, what do we do? MEXICO is bad, is evil, is a no fly zone, stay away, never go, do not even make eye contact with it.

It's making me very very angry.

Another commenter sums up how I want to respond:

Have you ever been to Mexico? Because your other assumptions about Mexico are just plain ignorant. Yes, there are cheap vactaions to be had in Mexico, yes the drug cartels are a huge problem, and yes the labour is cheap. But to reduce a country and it's population to these few things is ridiculous. By that logic, SARS hit Toronto because of the gang violence, and all of Canada is full of corrupt politicians and beavers.

You know what? To all the people who shun Mexico because they think it's full of swarthy villains looking to exploit and infect you, good riddance to you. This country is FAR better off without your ignorant whining.

Maybe leaving's not the only way to go

2009-04-13T16:38:00.002-04:00

I'm going to have to change the header description of this blog.

I'm leaving Mexico, you see - I received notice last week. The head office of the company I work for here scouted me back in February and I just completed a lengthy, rather strenuous interview process for a really exciting position based in the London office. They want me there "as soon as possible," although they grant me the time required to get my visa in order and, you know, move my entire life across the ocean. I should be there in a month or so, by my math.

When they first approached me with the opportunity, I was beyond thrilled. Sitting on the beach in San Agustinillo, Oaxaca, I wished on every single falling star (and, so far from any city, there were a lot of them) that it would happen. Digging my way up from dead-end-job-related depression, I told everyone who would listen that it was time for me to leave Mexico, while I still loved it but now that I could no longer see a future for me here.

And then it happened. I apparently impressed the Chief Information Officer enough that he offered me the position on the spot, tacked onto the end of what was just supposed to be an interview. The formal paper offer should arrive this week, which I will of course sign and return in due haste, feigning pure enthusiasm.

See, the thing is... It's not pure enthusiasm anymore.

It's still a phenomenal opportunity and, without question, the right thing to do, yes, I get that, I don't doubt that. Turning it down is not an option.

What's changed is angle from which I'm seeing this phenomental opportunity. Back in February, placing all my hope in the symbolism of a stellar flash, this was a matter of moving on from a job I find woefully unfulfilling in favour of a great career lunge forward. It was pure adrenaline, careerwise.

Now we are also talking about leaving Mexico.

Now I am wandering this city realizing that this could very well be my last time in front of my favourite statue in the Metropolitan Cathedral, my last chance to have tostadas in the market in Coyoacan. I wonder if I've already had my last visit to Xochimilco. I wonder if I'll ever see that perfect beach in San Agustinillo again.

And let's not even talk about the fact that I will have to abandon my cats for six months, while they await the results of the blood tests required before the UK will let them in.

Oh Mexico.

I am suddenly acutely aware of everything I'm giving up: the music, the colour, the life - those elements of Mexican passion that intoxicate me, teach me, that have changed me immeasurably. Has three years gone so fast? Perhaps if they delay in sending me the paperwork, I can delay that final goodbye.

I have this weakness, see? I am absolutely horrible at goodbyes, especially when they're going to hurt. I will see a beloved friend off at the airport with a curt, "right then, see you," before striding away without looking back. If I am forced to look goodbye in the face, I will dissolve into fretful tears, pleas to stay/to come/to make the sorrow go away, an almost childish fear of change. I wonder as the plane takes off whether the joy of being in a place justifies the immense pain of leaving.

I am deeply deeply afraid of this goodbye.

For the record, though, I do intend to keep blogging. The cultureshock factor will continue, both while in London and in the locations this new position will take me: Dubai, Tokyo, Sydney, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Kurdistan, etc, etc, etc. This new chapter is going to be immensely exciting...

Life versus Art

2009-03-12T11:47:00.002-04:00

I've seen a lot of movies in the past week, inspired, no doubt, by the recent Academy Awards and all the buzz surrounding the eight or so movies deemed worthy of every single nomination to be had. On Saturday I saw Milk; on Tuesday, The Wrestler; and last night, Slumdog Millionaire (or, as it's known in Mexico, Quisiera Ser Millionario). I liked all three of them quite a lot, for vastly different reasons.

(If you've not seen any of these movies, don't worry: I won't give anything away that might ruin the dramatic tension for you.)

I don't see a lot of movies here, mostly because I'm feverishly attempting to pay off my debts in Canada with the rapidly-plummeting Monopoly-money peso, but I enjoy going to the movies immensely due to how clearly it casts Mexican passion into light. A movie in Mexico City is not a movie, it's an EXPERIENCE.

Canadians tend to treat movies like we treat live theatre or dance: we enter, find our seats, chatter quietly until the film starts and then sit like stones until the film ends, at which point we pack up and leave. To talk during a movie is considered extremely rude. To have to pee during a movie is also remotely rude, as it involves standing up and briefly obstructing the sightline of the person behind you.

(Oddly, however, leaving your popcorn and drink behind to spill all over the floor? Commonplace. We Canadians are apparently wound up tight about noise pollution but general sanitation is not worth the effort. It's a bit weird, really.)

Mexican lives, in comparison, do not freeze for those sacred two hours. Last night, during Slumdog Millionaire, a guy's cellphone rang melodiously. He answered the call without shame: "Bueno?"

There was a short hiss for silence from elsewhere in the theatre.

"Yeah," he explained to the caller," I'm in a movie right now."

Damn right you are, I thought to myself, Canadian righteousness blazing. So why are you answering your cell, idiot?

"Slumdog Millionaire," he answered the caller. "Yeah, it's good."

I briefly contemplated what I had in my purse that could constitute a makeshift lethal weapon.

"I'll call you when it's done," he concluded and he hung up. The movie continued. We all moved on from the moment.

Actually, in three years here, I have yet to see a movie in which at least one cellphone didn't ring. Normally it's several. Sometimes the owner shame-facedly ignores the call; more often they answer and explain to the caller that, yes, sorry, can't talk right now. Every ring makes me marginally hostile but I've gotten over it, accepting it as just a part of living here.

But ringing cellphones are the annoying side of the Mexican joie de vivre, let's be fair. And the lovely side is really quite lovely indeed.

The peak moment of Slumdog Millionaire (again, working really hard here not to give too much away) occurs when the main character is faced with the 20,000,000 rupee question, for which the audience knows from a long string of hints throughout the movie that this kid does not know the answer. There is great tension as he contemplates his options. The Who Wants To Be A Millionaire music pounds, the blue spotlights flash up and down. There are shots of people across the city watching, breathlessly, fingers crossed, hoping hoping hoping.

And, behind me in the movie theatre, a women softly, plaintively whispers the answer.

Beside me, a middle-aged man and his wife/girlfriend clutch hands frantically.

In front of me, a young gay couple shake their heads in horror at the question. One says out loud, "Ay, no!"

It's incredible, isn't it, to live a movie like that? While I sat there contemplating the storytelling craftwork that brought us to that moment, these people around me were FEELING the movie. I'm sure there would have been tears if the guy did not get the girl in the end, so invested some of these audience members were.

I wondered, to skip backwards a few days, how the audience was going to react to Milk, given the rampant nervousness towards homosexuality apparent in the mass populus. That we were seeing the movie in Zona Rosa - the "Pink Zone" - was only marginal comfort, as I'd seen a movie there before that involved two men drunkenly kissing, and the audience moaned their horror. So how would the masses react to Sean Penn and Diego Luna rolling around naked together? Can a movie about gay rights go over in a country where young gay men feel compelled to flee to foreign countries and plead refugee status?

As it turns out, while the snogging twosome was marginally upsetting (perhaps because it was the trespassing of two straight men, and therefore more of a threat to the Mexican machismo?), Sean Penn's flamboyant, giggling, unapologetic Harvey Milk won the audience over without question. We cheered out loud when he won office finally. We sighed and muttered when he faced hostile discrimination. There were visible tears and audible sobbing at the end. And, as the credits began to roll, perhaps half the theatre broke into loud applause.

I love it, I just love it. I never realized how pent up we Canadians are until I came to this intense, vibrant country. There's an important lesson in all this.

The final countdown

2009-03-07T08:59:00.004-05:00

After nearly three years living here, loving here, I can feel my egg timer ticking now, starting a few weeks back.

The things that I adore about Mexico City still exist in all their full-throated glory - the mooing gas vendors, the street vendors, the colour, the chaos, the life - yet slowly slowly all that good stuff is getting swallowed up in the bad stuff - the perilous bolt through speeding traffic that ignores red lights and pedestrians, the air pollution that is leaving me permanently sinus congested and/or infected, and, more than anything, the dripping, heaving, ridiculous, stupid, horrific and off-putting machismo that permeates everything.

My friend Lance, visiting Mexico City in November, posed the same question to all my friends: if you could change two things about your country, what would they be? The men's answers varied, but the women all shot back the same #1, without having to think: machismo.

I agreed at the time, although I picked my two things to change about Mexico as the labour culture (in which workers feel disempowered and obligated to work 12+ hours a day for birdseed because at least they have a job and they should feel lucky, damn it) and the pollution. (Regarding Canada, I picked our hesitance to have a strong opinion about anything and our rampant inferiority complex.)

That's all changing now. Now, as the morale at my office goes into a ruthless nosedive due to fear of layoffs causing a great fight to push others down to be the top of the pile of crap, I grow everyday more sensitive to the claws-out ruthlessness of a macho society.

As I've mentioned before on this blog, my office is one in which women are openly relegated to subservient, low-power positions purely on the basis of gender. I have been told that I will never be promoted because I'm "delicate" and because "you need a penis to be a consultant." I have raged against this message, tried diplomacy, tried calm commitment to the now in the hopes that the male managers will see potential for more - nothing. Still delicate, still without that all-important organ.

Meanwhile, the manchildren I work with (which is a group of them, not everyone in the office) continue to lumber in late, unshaven, sometimes olfactorily and visibly still drunk and/or stoned from the night before, and they continue to talk shit about management to clients and take three hour lunches and watch YouTube all day, and STILL they are the chosen ones while the female lawyer goes into her seventh year as a secretary and I listen to my Masters degree cry while I clean up the client database for the seven-hundredth time.

(Ironically, one of my professors from university used to call me out all the time for being a tool of the patriarchy for wearing skirts, for having my dad be the Dean, for not rallying in anti-male sisterhood against the oppression. It wasn't that I didn't believe it existed, it was that, having been raised by a father who is horrified by the idea that women could be considered inferior, I just never felt particularly held back by my gender. Sorry Dr. K, I hear you know. I was just extremely lucky in that it took me 32 years to get there.)

And then let's look briefly at my woeful attempts to date - my GOD! There was the guy who, after a reasonably good first date, called me to tell me that he'd been thinking about my past experiences with men (of which he knew nothing about, incidentally) and he was okay with them. There was the guy who tried to look between my legs to see if I was... erm... ready for it, yet apparently so ready for it that it would be visible whilst still fully clothed. The last date, and by "last" I mean both most recent and final, no more, done, who, fifteen minutes into the conversation, began detailing his porn expertise. There was the... do I need to go on? It's humourous stuff, I suppose, now that the moment has passed. Perhaps its value lies there.

Lance theorized that this performance of hypersexuality has to do with these poor little boys feeling intimidated by the vast experience and slutitude of this redheaded guera, and they attempt to make up the difference by posing and posturing as the great lovestuds they see themselves to be. I have not gotten past the second date with any of them, the vast majority of the time because, while I admit I'm far more openly liberal than most Mexican women, the fastest way to make sure I won't ever go home with you is to assume I will.

And, in my hypersensitive state, I am starting to resist that same aggression in all its manifestations. Now, in the mornings, when I am almost always nearly plowed down by a taxi while crossing an intersection with a walk light and a traffic cop, I will stand in the middle of the street and howl obscenities at the passing car. Now when a guy makes kissy noises at me, I have the fight the rabid urge to punch him. Now when one of the manchildren launches into his idiotic boy laughter - huh huh huh huh! - I seethe so much on the inside that I wonder sometimes how it is that my chest hasn't exploded yet from the pressure. Now when a beloved, smart, strong female friend says to me that she just isn't complete without a man, any man, even a man who doesn't deserve her, I react so un-friend-like that she and I end up having to have the "are we cool?" conversation weeks later.

I am tired, so so so very tired, of this ridiculous overcompensation for... what?... If Octavio Paz is to be believed, it's overcompensation for a permeating sense of powerlessness and shame. And I guess that, coming in as a Canadian, both sentiments are quite foreign to me on a cultural level, so I can't and I don't understand why these incredible people don't just say(warning: cultural arrogance ahead), you know what? this sucks, let's change it. (She writes, while acknowledging the irony of a Canadian advising another country to be proactive...)

Mexico has taught me so many important lessons and my love for the city and for the country has not dimmed. I'm just... Yeah. I'm tired.

Tick tick tick tick...

Living on the edge

2008-12-17T11:23:00.009-05:00

During my first visit to Mexico, my now-roommate, then-Hospitality Club host, counselled me not to be afraid.

The truth is, I wasn't. Intimidated, perhaps, by the fact that I didn't speak Spanish and was more or less on my own to find my way to the pyramids, to Taxco, but not scared.

I was scared in Brazil, where I had spent two weeks four months earlier. There was one moment in Rio de Janeiro when, coming back to my hostel from Copacabana beach by metro as the sun set over the mountains, I realized that I didn't know in which direction to go upon exiting the station. Only a few blocks from my unmarked, steel-doored, camera buzzer-ed hostel but unable to ask for help and with darkness firmly settling in around me, the fear was choking.

(This is in stark contrast, incidentally, to a not particularly wise but thankfully unpunished decision to walk back to the hostel with my new friends a few evenings later, drunk on caiparinhas, cameras swinging from wrists, singing loudly in English, at 4am...)

I've not had the same fear in Mexico for a number of reasons:

First, while my five days in Rio involved a fair amount of late nights (I apologized to my friends one evening for going home "early" at 5am) and alcohol, my first visit to Mexico involved daytrips to interesting sites followed by quiet evenings "at home" with someone whose friendship had knocked me off my feet from the day I first met him. Now that I live here, drinking nights are limited to "optional" work events, in which I choke down a glass or two of wine in order to placate the General Manager and then head home for 9pm. I am not a party girl, which dramatically decreases my personal risk (see drunk/cameras/singing/4am story...).

Second, the violence against tourists in Rio is famous, to the extent that, when I was getting my visa, the Brazilian Embassy counselled me to always have the equivalent of US$20 in my pocket for muggers. Not having money because you were concerned about being mugged, see, is not an option. Poverty is so extreme and so evenly woven into all neighbourhoods that you can be mugged at gunpoint at 2pm in the afternoon, walking down a tourist-y beach with 20 of your closest friends.

That the Brazilian friend I was visiting, who wasn't with me in Rio due to work, spent every day with me hissing warnings probably didn't help my perception of Brazil as being just-around-the-corner perilous, actually.

Mexico City, in comparison, always seemed logical: don't go into the bad neighbourhoods, don't flash money, don't wear expensive jewelry, don't wander around at 3am, don't look lost and vulnerable, and you'll likely be fine. No one is pretending it's not a dangerous city, but all large cities are dangerous and this one didn't feel much worse than New York or London or even Toronto. When my friends came to visit, most of them looked at me with long faces and expressed some degree of concern about personal safety. "Ah," I would sagely tell them, "forget kidnappings. The biggest risk you have here is trying to cross the street."

In fact, in two and a half years, the only relatively violent thing that has happened to me is the theft of everything of value from my backpack while traveling by bus from Merida to Palenque in December 2006, and I personally bear a huge share of the blame for being so Canadian as to believe that luggage racks are for luggage. I never saw the men who rifled through my bag as I slept, but their thoroughness (I had money hidden in four places, including in a secret pocket and buried amid my dirty underwear, and they found every peso) and the deep slash that cut through roommate's bag, two shirts and several pairs of his underwear suggest that they were professionals with a fairly substantial knife.

This blissful period of fear ended watching the man lie in a pool of his own blood in the middle of Avenida Reforma last month. At first I was just twitchy about traffic, thinking of him every time a car zoomed past me as though I wasn't trying to cross a busy street, aided by police, with a walk signal. Morbid me, I watched the cars pass at the spot he was hit and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be hit, what my odds of survival would be. I visualized how far he must have flew. I grew paranoid that my end was near, flattened by a car, left to bleed on the street.

(Dramatic? Me?)

Last week, during my Spanish class, my teacher asked me to Google image search "Mexico City" and pick one I liked. Among the usual skylines, what came up on the first page was a vintage photo of a woman, a pedestrian, who had been pinned between a car and a pole near my house. She quite obviously had not survived the impact. My teacher and I studied it for a minute, before selecting a painting of the Zocalo back when it had trees.

On Sunday, a man in a white sedan slammed on his brakes to avoid a massive burgundy SUV driving the wrong way down Avenida Chapultepec, sending his car careening through a bus stop and through the glass of a storefront, while the burgundy SUV froze in fear in the middle of the street. The man in the sedan appeared fine, rolling down his good window to shout obscenities at the SUV, but his car was totalled. The micro in which I was riding rolled on, its passengers craning to watch the impending brawl.

On Monday, my roommate sent me a link to an article about an American kidnapping prevention expert who has been kidnapped. It does not appear to be a normal (as in: for profit, odds good) kidnapping. "Van a matarlo," said my colleagues. They're going to kill him.

This morning I watch the video attached to this article, about the piling up casualities of the narco war in Mexico, which tells me nothing I don't already know and shows me nothing I've not seen a hundred times before, but which fills me to the brim with dread nonetheless.

I am suddenly, painfully, acutely aware of my own mortality and my ability to suffer while meeting it. I am hypersensitive to threats that, before, seemed reasonably easy to avoid with some common sense. Every street crossed is one more minute lived, but not in a grateful zen way but rather in a breathless anticipation of some tragedy that is bound to come, every moment sooner. I am waiting for the worst case scenario to befall me, every time I leave the house or the office.

Why have such normal occurances as car accidents and corpse images triggered me so, and why now and not before? Did the puddle of blood on the street really screw with my head to such a degree, or is it something more?

More importantly, will it pass?

I love this country, yet this rampant fear is making me twitchy to return to safer climes (if those even exist). The sudden onset of this sensation, however, doesn't convince me that the risk is greater, only that I have somehow made it personal, internalized it, emotionalized it, am now worrying it like a dog with a particularly juicy hamhock.

I want to go back to being cautiously confident, damn it. If I should be scared of anything, it's the fact that I work maybe one kilometre away from the amusement park in Chapultepec I can barely make out the rollercoaster through the smog. Now THAT is something putting me in mortal peril...

Addendum to the last post

2008-12-16T16:56:00.002-05:00

Now I have proof I'm a remotely well-paid intern.

From the forwarded email of a project assigned to me today: "Inputting the data is a bit of a chore but I hope that you can call on some research assistant or secretarial expertise."

SO glad I did that Masters degree. It's sure paying off.

Zen. Calm. Well-paid. Secure. Time to blog. Pay off debts.

Breathing. Manchild is now considered an expert and has been asked to provide information direct to a desperate client. Machild appears to have just sold some services. Everyone is congratulating Manchild.

Breathing. Surly, but breathing. Calm. Zen.

Macho macho men

2008-12-15T18:33:00.003-05:00

Women got the right to vote in Canada thanks to a suffragette movement, led by Dr. Emily Howard Stowe, beginning in 1878. The province of Manitoba was the first to grant all women the right to vote (previous efforts had allowed the vote to spinsters and widows only, or to married women but only if their husbands were ineligible) on January 27, 1916, with the other provinces seemingly reluctantly following in the years subsequent. Of the many notable displays of female strength during this time was Nellie McClung’s famous mock parliament speech in 1914, in which she reversed gender roles and speculated on all the horrible things that would happen were men to have the vote.

Women in Russia began to take active roles in worker revolts in 1872 at the Krenholm factory, followed by the Lazeryev textile factory in 1874 and the New Cotton-Spinning Plan in 1878. As a result of their resistance, the tsarist government rushed through legislation protecting the rights of women and children in 1885. By 1905, women demanding the right to vote and protesting the war with Japan were storming military and police headquarters, armed with rakes, pitchforks and brooms, kidnapping the men and driving armed guards from the villages.

The stories are endless: Mary Wollstonecraft, Christina of Sweden, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Marguerite Durand, Tahirih, Florence Blackwell, Celia Sanchez, Agnes McPhail, Louise Michel, Katti Anker Moller, Virginia Woolf, Sojouner Truth, Clara Zetkin, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer… and on and on and on… tremendous, strong, unstoppable women who hammered on doors and suffered in prison and shouted until they were hoarse in order to force the change that they and their (my) gender were owed.

The legacy of whom make it a bit hard to stomach the fact that I have decided to sit down and shut up.

I have been in my job for over six months now, and what was once bright-eyed bushy-tailedness has faded to sullen disapproval of the status quo. While I still respect the company as a whole immensely and have not yet doubted my ability to make a career of the work, the machismo has been hard to stomach. I have watched a manchild in his early 20s, fresh out of school, torn and ripped jeans, chronic lateness, famously incompetent work, be sent off to deal with a client while I, apparently, am “not ready.” I have watched one of the two bright, strong, competent female managers break down in tears because she feels her job is threatened, while the other admits to dumbing herself down in order not to threaten the overwhelmingly male power structure. I, recently, was told that I am too “delicate” to be a consultant, based, I’m assuming, on the day I was sad because my cat had sliced himself to death, because I’m not sure where else I’ve shown delicacy.

I guess I did jump in at the deep end, choosing (naively) to work in a Latin American branch of this particular industry (I’m going to spare details to protect the company and, well, my job, but to give you a sense: half my colleagues are retired Navy S.E.A.L.s and Colombian military commanders…). In my interview, one of the managers said, “In this company, if you shine, you REALLY shine.” “Oh!” I thought to myself, “Then shine I shall… Bring it on!” What they neglected to mention is that a penis a prerequisite to shining.

Ah, you may laugh, but this has actually been said. When I went to productively express my frustration on being systematically pushed to the side for learning opportunities that would help me achieve me goals here, my (male) boss said, “Well, you have to be one of the boys, and they’re pretty much comparing penises all the time.”

“[The baby-talking female manager] is one of the boys!” I protested. “Yes, well,” he said, “She has a bigger penis than any of them.”

Right. So. The message is clear, then: A penis is mandatory, be it literal or figurative.

The problem is that I am not a penis-bearing woman, either literally or figuratively.

I am not a girlie-girl. I don’t wear pink and sparkles and decorate my desk with poodles and fuzzy bunny Post It notes. I don’t giggle and flip my hair when boys speak to me. I can talk about more than nail polish and how pretty Angelina Jolie may or may not be. I am a girl in that I have two X chromosomes, am theoretically able to incubate a baby and am allowed to wear skirts. I have moments of emotional sensitivity, which I am getting better at overriding and moving on before anyone realizes I’ve triggered. I wear v-neck shirts because I am amply-endowed and anything scooped or turtled makes me look enormous, not because I think cleavage will get me anywhere I particularly want to go. My gender is who I am, not a performance of femininity or masculinity, and neither hinders nor helps my innate abilities to do a job and do it well.

I am furious that I have been written off as “delicate.” Gah.

My stepmother, she who was Vice President of an enormous national company by her mid-30s, has given me some tips and a stack of books on how to be a female executive (which I’m not… yet…) and the mistakes women make. She says to be a sister to the boys, if I can’t whip out my own appendage in answer to theirs. The books say not to sit with your foot up underneath you (I’m sitting like that right now) and to never ask for permission and to never show emotion and to never bring in cookies (I can’t cook so that’s not an issue) and to just assume that you’re the best in the room.

And I’ve tried all the above (save the sitting position one – it’s so comfortable!) and I’ve had some success, but I’m realizing something key:

I’M IN MEXICO.

Her advice and the advice in the books, it's good. It's really good.

But it's good advice for a woman seeking to succeed in 21st century Canada, US, Britain, not Latin America.

To succeed here, in this business, in this country, surrounded by these men, I am going to have to be something that I really don’t think I am. I am not going to put a crack in that Mexican tiled ceiling because to do so means being either super girlie and launching a surprise attack when they least expect it or by macho-ing up and talking about shitting in the garbage can with deep belly laughs along with the boys. Proudly, I think I am even less capable of being Barbie than I am being Joe.

And I have to admit it: the battle in the last six months to be considered for projects, to be allowed to participate, to be heard, has worn me out. I don’t want this enough to keep fighting as hard as I have been. I am not the woman to take down this Goliath, Nellie, I’m sorry.

They want me to be the editor, fine, I’ll be the editor. They know this leaves me with free time but, rather than agitating to fill said time with work, I’m going to do my own thing: blog, work on my plays, maybe some freelance writing. In the meantime, in place of the frustration and anger and jealousy that has been quietly pecking holes in my work ethic and self-esteem, I’m going to rest calmly in the knowledge that my job is secure in an otherwise insecure labour environment, that it pays me enough to slowly pay off my albatross debts, and that it gives me an unlimited supply of Coke Zero and occasional fantastic lunches and dinners. I’ll be the best damn editor they could ever hope for, and I’ll ride that glowing reference to a career where my genitals do not dictate my abilities.

My brilliant and provocative friend Lance came to visit me in November, during which time he asked virtually everyone I know the same question:

“If you could change two things about Mexico, what would they be?”

The men’s answered were varied, and came after some thought, ranging from pollution to money to inherent hope (or lack thereof).

The women all snapped back the same answer, with not a second’s hesitation or thought. The second thing took more time, but that first thing, that one thing they’d like to change, that one thing that they feel is holding back their country and themselves, was, of course… Yes. Of course it was.

If I may be so strong, machismo is a plague in this country. It teaches men that they must be aggressive idiots in order to be masculine, and women to be submissive, temper tantrum-throwing womb-bearers in order to be loved. Several of my smart female friends are leaving Mexico for countries wherein they are allowed to pursue burgeoning notions that being smacked around by your husband is not something to grin and bear - a gender drain of some of the best and brightest that, if given the chance, could start to turn things around. It makes me angry and it makes me sad, given how much true, real, unique beauty there is in this country.

Blog Bites

2008-12-15T17:00:00.001-05:00

I wrote these a long time ago (pre-editing, one of them said "two weeks into my new job...", which would make it many many months old now), but I thought I'd throw them up, why not.

****

The best part of my job is the floor to ceiling 360 degree view of the city from the 20th floor, with the volcanoes peeking up in the distances and the cars creeping by underfoot. It makes working late worthwhile if only to see the sun set red behind the mountains, sending sharp shafts of light to pierce the smoggy dusk.

****

On my second day in the office, I went to the store in the base of the building to buy a coke. The price, 12 pesos, was almost three times what a can of coke would cost in any other store but, alas, there are no other stores in the vicinity.

Ah good, thought I, I’ve been meaning to cut down on my intake of chemicals. 12 pesos cokes will help that endeavour.

Then I discovered the bottomless supply of free coke in the office fridge.

Damn it. And yay! And damn it.

****

There is no business meeting that isn’t immeasurably improved by the sight of giraffes lumbering around in the zoo at the foot at the building. Sometimes there are ostriches and gazelle/deer-like whatnots too, but those lovely lanky giraffes win every time.

****

The Human Stain

2008-12-03T13:40:00.003-05:00

There is a stain on the road where a man used to be.

I think he survived, or at least my limited understanding of injuries suggests that the fact he was still conscious, moving and talking as they loaded him into the ambulance, after lying face down in the middle of Avenida Reforma for about 20 minutes, is a good sign. I should think that massive head trauma would have precluded consciousness.

The stain is from the substantial amount of blood that pooled from his head area. The blood is what brought me and my colleagues to the window to watch.

But it’s not the gawking or the poor pedestrian losing a gamble to run between the cars that any of us in this city has taken many, many times before that I want to talk about here. It’s the relief.

Some time ago, I wrote a post about the Mexican obsession with death, and the related corpses that are displayed without apology or demure angling on the front page of several different daily newspapers. Monday was a photo of decapitated heads in a row; today is someone in the front seat of their car, although I didn’t stop to find out where or why. I just don’t need to know, you know?

I became briefly, anonymously famous on Monday when a comment I made on the website Jezebel, related to said proliferation of images of violence in Mexico, got picked up and quoted in an article by the website Racialicious. The original article on Jezebel, which was expounded upon later at the other site, was related to the Mumbai images coming down the media pipeline: one editor believed that the photos of blood pools was exploitative and desensitizing, while the other argued that, no, we need more explicit photos than pools in order to truly drive the violence home. It’s a great discussion, actually. You can read it here: Questioning the Appropriate Imagery of Tragedy.

I left the following musing:

“Down here in Mexico, graphic photos are par for the course. This morning is an
excellent example: in the wake of news of a massive cache of decapitated narco victims being discovered in Tijuana, the front page of the famously graphic newspaper La Prensa showed, yes, a row of lined up heads with the headless
bodies beside them.

When I first arrived in Mexico several years ago, there had been another decapitation incident, this time five heads in Acapulco. I was sitting across from a guy reading the paper when I saw the photo of the heads, and I recoiled in horror, looked away, felt nauseous and violated. Now, this morning, I actually scanned the paper calmly as I walked by the stand.

I don't know if I'm a better, more realistic, eyes-open person for seeing this kind of graphic violence every single morning without fail (Mexicans do love their corpses - there are several papers that publish "nota roja" photos every day), but I do know that Mexicans have a MUCH more sensible and aware understanding of death and the implication of violence than any of us up in the Land of the Frozen North with our euphemisms ("she passed on") and quiet, mostly unvisted graveyards. Mexicans understand the fragility of life and the reality of violence, and the way they live their lives is evidence of this.

Yes, it's gawking, even for the Mexicans who giggle at charred corpses, but feeling cathartic relief that it was our neighbour who got robbed and not us is pretty much part of the human condition. Pretending that death - and especially violent death - is something clean and pretty and calm is pretending that we will all meet our end peacefully in our beds, surrounded by loved ones. Death is usually ugly. We need to stop being afraid of its realities.

All that being said, I still believe human decency must be followed. Recently, there was a photo of a teenage girl who had been raped, tortured and strangled, then left on the street with her shirt pulled up over her head. I couldn't look. All I could think about was how that poor girl had gone through this evening of incalculable suffering, only to have her poor nude body printed on the front page of a newspaper, in full colour, to be gawked at. Admitting violence is one thing; humiliating the dead is another.”

I actually thought, at the time, that I was arguing on the side of the editor who wanted more violence, but the editor from Racialicious pulled the comment as, “driv[ing] home the point I wanted to make.” (I’m totally honoured to be quoted by such esteemed thinkers, incidentally.) Full Racialicious post available here: How Should We Handle Deaths When Reporting Current Events?

The two sides of the argument stayed with me all that night, though. While I do respect the Mexican ability to see death as part of life and not something to be whispered and scented and covered with flowers until nary a bony white finger remains visible, I’m not a convert to the daily corpse offerings by any means. I do not think I am a better person for knowing what a high-speed vehicle accident looks like, or what happens to a human body trapped in a blazing house fire. I worry sometimes that our (being the entire human race) tendency to rubberneck comes less from Aristotelian carthasis than from some sick desire to gape and say “ooooooh blood!” in a way that completely removes what we should be feeling, which is a sense of shared humanity and shared loss.

Which is why I bring up the man on the road. When we first heard the scream, of course we all fled to the window to see what had happened. “Someone’s been hit!” a colleague cried out. “Oh my god!” cried another (probably me), as we fought for space along the glass like penguins. “Is that blood?” “Oh god, that IS blood!” “That’s a LOT of blood!” “Is he moving?” “I think he’s dead. He’s got to be dead.” “Which car hit him?” “That red one, look, with the clean spot on the hood.” “Oh my god, he’s totally dead. He’s not moving.”

And we clustered and we shared observations, and the Human Resource Manager was trying to lead us away one by one, telling us we didn’t need to see this, pleading with us to go back to our desks, but we’d sit down for a few seconds only to pop back up the moment one of the remaining gawkers shouted an update. “I think it’s coffee.” “Dude, it’s red, it’s blood.”

Yes, I looked, focusing mostly on the red spot, fascinated and horrified at the same time. Here was a La Prensa photo, but live. Wow. God. Ew.

But what is so so important about this story is, yes, yes, we ran to the window, and yes, yes, we argued about the blood, but the overwhelming sentiment being expressed?

“I just need to see him move.”
“Where is the ambulance? Why is it taking so long? Should we call, just to make sure?”
“What if he has a family, kids?”
“The police have a First Aid kit, thank god.”
“They’re rubbing his back! He must be alive!”

Not until we saw his arm move could we return to work. “He’s talking!” said one colleague, using binoculars. “He’s talking!!!” we crowed back, triumphantly.

None of us, not one among the thronging crowd, wanted to see Death down there on the pavement. The blood was titillating but more important than anything was that this poor man, with his grey tie and his black suit and his scattered papers, would get the medical treatment he obviously needed and would recover and would go spend the Christmas season (it’s a Catholic country so forgive my non-politically correct specification there) with his family and his kids, right as rain.

Anecdotal, perhaps, but I found it deeply comforting that, despite being surrounded by images of graphic violence beyond imagining, stories of massacres and suicides and traffic accidents and narco hits, and no matter how desensitized we may or may not become to the two-dimensional image, humanity is still stronger.

Thoughts?

Meow?

2008-10-14T17:02:00.002-04:00

It’s always smart to be prudent with strong, overarching statements as, more often than not, they come back to haunt you. Don’t you find?

I have two Mexican cats: Mezcalito and Pao. Mezcal was the result of missing my aged Canadian cat so much that I, with very little thought, offered to take in a three-month old kitten found in a drainpipe. One year of bloodied legs and destroyed home furnishings later, I took into tiny, feisty little Pao to see if some company would quell Mezcal’s vaguely homicidal play patterns. She did, despite being half his size and less than half his bodyweight. They’re now the best of friends.

But I never actually wanted two cats. And, faced with the lovely amicable affectionate purr-happy little Pao and the still mildly destructive “don’t touch me” Mezcalito, I remarked a few weeks ago to my roommate that I wished I had gotten Pao first and therefore never a Mezcal.

Wednesday morning, six days ago, Mezcal threw up on the carpet. I shrugged it off: cats throw up, it’s in their job description.

Wednesday afternoon, my roommate and I returned from work to find the floor absolutely covered in light green liquid and a very lethargic, very sad looking cat.

Thursday morning, I took the still vomiting and almost limp cat to the vet. The vet took some blood and gave him something for the vomiting.

Friday morning, my roommate took the still vomiting and near catatonic feline and checked him into the hospital. He was so dehydrated that, if you pinched the skin on the back of his neck, it stayed there, peaked. He hadn’t eaten since Tuesday, by my math. He didn’t fight being put in the cage.

A very long weekend followed.

It’s now Tuesday and he’s still in the hospital. In the wee hours of this morning, after days of (expensive) tests that couldn’t prove one way or the other what was wrong with the (still vomiting) cat, the vet sliced him open and found his stomach and intestines jam-packed with white sewing thread. Eight incisions later and he’s in recovery, doped up to the whiskers with antibiotics to stave off infection but officially thread free. His digestive system, previously paralyzed, appears to be moving again. There is hope, although his situation is critical. Tomorrow they will try to give him some food and see what happens.

It’s been a week, let me tell you. There have been tears.

And how long into this ordeal do you think it took me to regret ever saying that I wished I had never adopted this cat?

That would be the moment, on the first day at the vet, when the doctor told me that his symptoms could be those of either feline AIDS or feline leukemia – both fatal diseases that usually result in the cat being put down.

It was… unthinkable. The idea of him sleeping in that cage over there, not on my bed here, was unthinkable. Watching Pao look for him and cry was unthinkable. The slow realization, pre-surgery, that I could be witnessing Mezcal’s last days alive was unthinkable.

I wrote a post, a long time ago, about how I struggled with the temptation to romanticize Mexico’s social problems because they, in turn, create a culture where family and faith is more important than having new curtains. In some twisted, overly romantic way, I implied that fear puts things into perspective. (This argument would be subsequently contradicted by my last post, about fighting to the death for every crumb of bread…)

I can’t say whether it’s true, but certainly I will be more than a little relieved if and, hopefully, when Pao is reunited with her hulking, sulking, wonderful brother.

At which point I will begin making payments to the vet bill. Oy. Cat owes me BIG TIME. He'd better live forever now.

__________________________________________________________

An hour ago, Wednesday, the day after this post, Mezcal suffered a heart attack and died.

Goodbye my Mezcalito. Te quiero mucho.

Taking it on the chin

2008-09-28T21:10:00.002-04:00

So I've been having a little trouble with my job - nothing major, just eagerness and high expectations being slowly squished by reality - but it's been eye opening.

After a few days of drooping energy, my Nicarguan colleague, Eddy, called me over into the office nook, where he looked hard at me.

"I'm worried about you," he said.

"I'm just... It's just... And then... And you know how..." I replied, eloquently.

And Eddy began to rant.

This is real life, he said. Real life sucks, he said. Real life REALLY sucks. And you can't let the suckage of real life get you down, you have to just bite down hard on the stick you put between your teeth so you don't bite off your tongue and you get on with it. People, he said, people will always try to screw you, keep you down, hold you back. That's just the way it is.

All of which whooshed me waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy back to a time when, wandering the graveyard in which Diego Rivera (but not Frida...) rests his communist head for eternity, the guy I had been dating said sadly to me that the thing he hated most about Mexico is that Mexicans (his words, not mine) will steal the bread from the mouth of their starving neighbour. This was, he explained, his reason for deciding to walk away and move to Texas the next month. (Which he subsequently did, never once looking back with a flicker of regret or nostalgia.)

Watching Eddy set his jaw and furrow his brow and stare me down, pupil to pupil, that morning, I realized that Eddy would have agreed with my ex. Eddy, scratching and clawing his way up to a promising mid-level consultant position in Mexico - that was entirely his accomplishment. No one gave him a boost, an edge, a toe in the door. His wife and children follow him here because here is a step up from there, but this step is only one of several for this man determined to take on the world with eyes blazing.

I cried while Eddy talked to me, but perhaps not for the reasons he believed. Yes, I was frustrated, and, yes, I had spent a large part of the two days prior on the verge of or giving over completely to frustrated tears, but that morning... that morning I cried for how sad I found the assertion that life was a fight to the death with everyone around me.

Am I naive? Is that how it works in Canada?

I have lived in a bubble in many ways, spending my life up to the point of moving to Mexico in the high intensity but relatively barrier-free world of theatre. Never seeking to be an actress (and therefore never really going through the harrowing ordeal of being too fat/tall/redheaded/freckled/whatever for a role), I coasted through academia and producing judged only on my ability to write a grant proposal and balance the books. As a producer, people came to me hoping I would give them work. Opening nights were flurries of promises made for future projects, egos petted, friendships and business relationships exploding and coming together.

Ok, so, admittedly, this... THIS... is my first taste of the corporate world. I've just decided to up the ante a little by trying to play with the boys in a language not my own, in a country famous for its machismo. So I honestly don't know where the cultural line should be drawn here, if at all.

But I am baffled and I am lost.

I'm not implying that glass ceilings and nepotism and whatnot do not exist in Canada, for they most certainly do. Without question.

Nor am I tempted to glorify my homeland by crossing my fingers behind my back and earnestly repeating that we are brothers who believe in opportunity and dignity for all. I have taken direct hits from a woman terrified that I was gunning for her job (I was, although not immediately), both personally and professionally, and it's taken some time to come to terms with the fact that this woman was actually, actively trying to hold my head underwater and that that's okay. It happens, that's just how it is.

But this overarching sense of having to watch your back at all times? That I don't remember.

I'm hardly the only one experiencing some frustration at work, however much we may respect the company as a whole. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about promised opportunities failing to manifest and bosses who just don't seem to care so much about the dipping morale. I do, however, seem to be the only one who actually believes that the General Manager's door will fling open someday, and out will pour fluffy bunnies and rainbows and gold coins for all; the majority of my fellow malcontents seethe and plot and resent, and periodically check their backs for dagger handles.

Is it me that's naive or is it my culture?

When you come from a land when there government will top up your income if you're not earning enough, perhaps you do end up feeling snug and cosy in the idea that someone has your back. Everyone may not like me or support me, but I rest comfortably that I am guaranteed my chance and only my personal level of effort and skill will decide if I progress or not.

Back in Brasil, my Mexican doctor said to me that it made him sad knowing that one day he would have to choose between his ambitions and his country. It made me sad too, at the time, as I have always believed my country is all about enabling me to reach my goals.

Perhaps we're both naive, me and Canada. Ask the native boy growing up in Kapuskasing, Ontario whether Canada is all about supporting us to reach our true potential.

I like naive. Naive is bolstering, naive is empowering, naive is "you can be anything if you just want it badly enough."

Naive is struggling right now at being told that there's just no room for her to be all that she can be.

Naive is sad at the fact that this country might be full of people who feel that the cards are stacked high and mightily against them, and that only with bloodied fingernails and lost teeth do they ever have a chance of rising above their Now.

Raising the alarm

2008-09-12T15:16:00.004-04:00

For those of you keeping track of world politics, I moved to Mexico about a week after the federal election in which winner Felipe Calderon edged out runner-up Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador by less than half a percent amid rampant accusations of fraud, election buying, and other nefarious doings. (Known narco with blood on his hands Roberto Madrazo came third.)

Among the numerous and still continuing results of this controversy was first the attendance of one million people, dressed in yellow, howling their protest that Obrador was the rightful winner, followed by the installation of an encampment of several thousand people for more than a month right down the middle of Paseo de la Reforma, one of the main east/west traffic thoroughfares in the this city. The encampment would finally break disperse, allegedly of its own volition, the weekend before the September 16th Day of Independence, on which the Mexican army always rolls right down that street, protestors or no protestors, tents or no tents, children or no children.

Since then, now working high above the intersection of Reforma and Archimedes, where political protestors inevitably head in the attempt to send a message to Los Pinos, the home of the country’s President, I have witnessed many other and equal marches and sit- ins. The most recent was yesterday, in which teachers in Morelos not only closed off Reforma, but pretty successfully shut down any possibility of traffic moving within half a kilometre of this building for the entire afternoon. Some of my colleagues, waiting eternally for their lunch order from Subway, were apoplectic, while others snapped pictures and ran back and forth across the office to monitor developments in each of the eight or so blockades. Vendors started to show up, pushing their little carts of chips and salsa and fruit and magazines and whatnot through the throngs (opportunity is not a lengthy visitor!).

“Oh!” I said to one colleague, pressed equally enthusiastically against the window to try to make out what the assembling crowds were singing, “I just *love* this about Mexico City!”

And I do, I do love this about Mexico! I mean, let’s just put aside the idea that you can count the number of cities in Canada with a population greater than one million on one hand (or have we squeaked to both hands yet with the Alberta oil boom?) – just imagining what it would take to rouse one million Canadians into vociferous protest is a delicious exercise in futility. It’s not that we’re not a passionate people, as I do believe we are in many ways, we’re just… well, we’re just not a taking to the streets and howling about it kind of people. When the United States entered Iraq, in what the majority of Canadians believe to be an illegal and immoral war, two hundred or so people appeared on the front step of the federal parliament building and burnt a flag! When the Canadian government was implementing a much-opposed two-tiered healthcare system a few years back, the public outcry was so intense that some people were driven to write a few letters to the editor!!

Oh Mexico, oh hearty, passionate Mexico, how you enthrall me with your mighty fervour for having a voice! I don’t drive, so I’m not bothered by your roadblocks. I’m just impressed and amazed by your rabid love for action.

Or I was, at least, up until the moment I made that comment to my colleague, but, as it happens, said colleague happens to know how all it works. And so my dreams of the little man taking to the streets in democratic fury were crushed.

There is a taco lady at the base of our building, who sells lovely crammed full tacos from the back of her car. They are delicious.

The taco lady, however, does not have a permit for vending. Street vending, anyone who’s visited Mexico City might be surprised to learn, is not generally allowed.

So let’s say Mrs. Taco earns a thousand pesos a day (she could dream!) selling her truck boot creations.

At which point Mr. Junior Police Office walks up and says, hey, you don’t have a license to sell those. Give me five hundred pesos and I won’t shut you down and throw you in jail. So Mrs. Taco does, going on to serve tacos another day.

Mr. Junior Police Officer goes back to the precinct, where Mr. Senior Police Officer says, hey, how much did you get today? And Mr. Senior Police Officer takes $300 of Mrs. Taco’s extorted $500.

And so it goes, up and up and up, each one getting their share of poor Mrs. Taco’s earnings, until the money ends up in some government body’s coffers AND…

Oh no....

... funds protests against the government in power.

My beautiful, musical, colourful, vibrant, colossal, spectacular, fiestas of the street are not only not an expression of one’s right and need to speak your piece, and not only the result of the endemic corruption plaguing every step of life in this country, they are merely ploys by Obrador against Calderon, or Calderon against Obrador, or some man-child against some man-child, hastily pocketing their share of Mrs. Taco’s profits while pouring gracious thanks to the people who “support” their cause.

I am… gutted. I so much preferred my idea of Mexican as walking powder kegs of democratic ferocity to struggling campesinos so desperate for money that they will camp for a month in the middle of a main thoroughfare and make their signs and shout their slogans so long as the pesos to keep them there keep tricking in.

Not to mention poor Mrs. Taco...

****************************

Note for all you who flipped me notes wondering about the silence: Um, yeah, sorry about that. The sad reality to a twelve hour workday is not only the complete lack of time and energy to blog, but a kind of mental exhaustion that reduces your ability to form opinions to, "huh, how 'bout that..." I'll try and be better!

Tick, tick, tick... phsssssssssssssss.........

2008-07-02T17:04:00.001-04:00

When I met the Mexican Who Started It All (TMWSIA) in Brazil back in 2005, he nearly stopped my heart when he told me he wanted five children. Five children! Five children are for frontier people, needing helping hands to break that soil, harvest that crop, take care of the young'uns. Five children are the legacy of past generations, before prophylactics and tiny white hormones turned procreation into recreation. Five children are... FIVE... CHILDREN...

Now, I'm hardly Santa Angelina here in my yearnings for the next generation. In fact, were my life to continue along the same path it's been on, without any dreamy love of my life sweeping in and changing everything, I can pretty safely say that I will never be one of those women who, in their late 30s, start eyeballing potential donors with almost predatorial need. No, I can look you straight in the eye and tell you that the fulfilment of my life does not require offspring, be it biological, adopted, or purchased off the black market.

(I joked once to TMWSIA that my purpose in Mexico was, in fact, to swipe one of those edibly cute little walking Precious Moments doll Mexican toddlers. Without blinking, he said, "Why swipe? I'm sure you could buy one." He was right. That makes me sad.)

(Where was I?)

When I tell a Canadian friend that I don't at this point foresee motherhood in my future, every single one of them says something along the lines of, "Yeah, I know what you mean..." or "I'm glad I had this one but I wonder sometimes..." or "No? Mmmm. Yeah... maybe... I don't know..."

When I tell a Mexican friend this, however, you'd think I'd just confessed to them that, from this point forward, I would be eating through my nose.

A colleague (who wants six children), last week: "It has been proven that people who don't want children usually had bad childhoods and are afraid of putting their kids through the same thing."

Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Colleague, continuing: "Or they're selfish, don't want to spend their money on someone else."

Selfish?

Other colleague (who has one, wants at least two more), responding: "I didn't want them either when I was in my 20s. It changes."

She's younger than me. Still stuck on the "selfish," anyway, me.

Chorus of colleagues: But... why?

I just don't want them.

Chorus of colleagues: But... why not?

I just... don't.

Chorus of colleagues: But it's life-changing! Mesmerizing! Indescribable.

I doubt none of it. Yet.

Do I need a reason for not wanting them? Because I don't have one. I just don't. I don't feel squishy when I see babies and I don't feel googly when I see toddlers and I don't feel warm and fuzzy when the truly amazing kid of my truly amazing best friend falls asleep against my arm, or at least not any more than the warmth generated by the realization that someone loves and trusts you enough to fall asleep against you (age and relation irrelevant).

Chorus of colleagues: ... Selfish.

How much of this is cultural?

The estimated birth rate for Mexico for 2008 is 20.04 births per 1,000 population. Canada is at 10.29 births per 1,000 population, or just above half that of Mexico.

Let's put this in perspective, culturally-speaking. 10.29 births per 1,000 population translates into a fertility rate of 1.57 children born per woman. Given that it takes two people to make a baby, a fertility rate of 1.57 children born per woman means that, allowing for a bit of generalization in the grand name of a making a dramatic point, if immigration was not a reality, CANADA WOULD CEASE TO EXIST. 32 million times negative fertility rate, carry the two... well... eventually, anyway.

Mexico is at 2.37 children born per woman. (That's lower than I expected, if I'm being honest. That would imply not every Mexican wants seventeen children. Damn those generalizations proving themselves to be overreactive.)

And, just for kicks and comparisons, the US is at 2.1 children born per woman.

Well, see: my country is not a country of reproducers.

So when I confess to not feeling a pang for the little sprogs to my northern sisters, it's not a foreign concept to them. I don't need to have higher priorities (I don't not want children because it's all about my career or freedom or whatnot) and I don't need to be sick or twisted or broken in some way or coveting of my hard-earned money, hands off you parasitic spawn. It's okay to just not particularly want. My Canadian friends get it, even if they, themselves, might be gestating their third while breastfeeding their second and overseeing their first's game of building blocks.

But down here the concept of Family as Centre of Everything is so deep in the very fibre of their realities, being single and childless at 32 - nay, being okay with being single and childless at 32 - is absolutely, utterly, completely incomprehensible.

The Mexican Family as Centre of Everything is, without question, one of the things I love most about this country, because it trickles down into everything: staying at home with families until you're ready to begin your next family; eating lunch always in the company of others (as opposed to the Toronto-style 20 minute functional refuelling); actually knowing your aunts and uncles and cousins as family and not just distant relatives with similar bloodlines. In the absence of my family (and with only a few questions about how I was ever possibly able to move so terribly far away from them), Mexican families tend to informally adopt me, welcome me in. The Virgin of Guadalupe is heralded as "mother of Mexico, mother of orphans" - blue waistribbon symbolizing her own impending motherhood, bent to welcome the rest of us into her embrace.

It is absolutely impossible to not have a mother in this country. I find that indescribably beautiful.

But, remember: there are of course the countless studies that show the correlation between poverty and large families, higher education levels and childlessness, religion and "traditional family values," etc. etc. etc. All in all, as an upper middle class, Masters degree-bearing Canadian agnostic, I'd say the odds are pretty stacked against me, no?

And, yes, fine, if I listen veeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrryyyy carefully when all the computer's have been turned off and no one else is around, I can hear the merest tiniest wisp of a tick-tick-tick, although I'm pretty sure that has more to do with the intellectual reality that 32=very close to medical geriatric mother than to any quiet need waiting to be nudged to full volume.

But try telling any of that to your average Mexican.

It's just...

I'm just...

It's not...

Sigh.

Can't I just be a special kind of parasite, warming myself in the light of your familial closeness without having to go there myself? I'll bring maple syrup.

Thanks

2008-07-01T10:11:00.003-04:00

I have a post currently percolating, almost done, but I'm going to delay it ever so slightly to say... thanks.

I keep this blog for two main reasons: because I love to write and because the process of writing, even when stream-of-consciousness, as this blog tends to be, helps me filter through my swirling chaotic whirlpool of a brain to find the solid ideas and opinions. I write for an unknown audience - unknown in both who they are and even if they are. I haven't the faintest idea who reads this blog, save for the occasional friend or family member who'll flip me an email citing something I've said here and I say, "wow, you read it!?" I tell my friends they're not obligated to read it - gone are the days of audience fishing, thank goodness - but I'm touched whenever they do.

So to all the strangers who've popped by the last two weeks and left such warm, thoughtful, interesting comments, thank you so very much for taking the time to share your ideas and say such kind things. It means more to me than any combination of words will ever manage to convey.

That is all.

Stairway to Heaven

2008-06-24T15:46:00.000-04:00

So I’m sitting in the beautiful lunchroom of my excellent new job, munching away on leftover Mexican-but-made-by-a-Canadian quesadillas and gazing out at the view offered by floor-to-ceiling windows on the 20th floor, when I notice that, on the unfinished floors of the uncompleted skyscraper just across the way, someone has strung up a thin white string at about knee-level to stop the workers plummeting to their doom.

My Canadian Workers Compensation Board training kicked in almost instantly. Trained well by graphic 30 second commercials in which young women are horribly disfigured by boiling pots of water after slipping on a spill someone had neglected to clean up or sliced into pieces after tumbling off an unattended ladder into a glass display case, I clucked my judgmental tongue at that silly piddly string and the idea that it would save anyone. I rolled my eyes. I sighed for the workers, poor vulnerable little sods. “There’s no such thing as an ‘accident’!”

But the reality was, gentle reader, the people being protected by that ineffectual tripwire were, in fact, the lucky ones, the protected ones. The lucky little sods, as it were.

Because up, way up, on the climbing roof of the building, were the majority of the workers, milling over the concrete and steel skeleton like ants on a dead gecko, pounding and pushing and tossing and stacking and hammering and hollering. Of the 30 or so guys, maybe five wore helmets. None wore gloves or protective eyewear. They stood beside towering stacks of unbound metal beams and climbed up teetering columns on rebar. There was nary a harness or rope to be seen.

I felt vaguely queasy. I had visions of someone getting squashed by a cascade of metal or tripping on something and plunging off the edge of the building.

And then I saw him: a young man squatting on a 2x2 (I’m guessing – not so much a carpenter, me) that stuck out about thirty centimeters from the external rebar shell of the building. The board was visibly bowing slightly under his weight. The heels of his trainers dangled over nothingness.

He was, based on my vantage point on Floor 20, about 15 stories above the ground. 15 stories straight down, a sheer grey concrete face with nothing to stop him where he to lose his balance, get a leg cramp, trip...

And he didn’t seem to care. Why would he, really, when he was only one of about 10 men wandering around on the narrow wooden spines. Two even stopped to have a cigarette and a bottle of water, chatting amiable as their shoelaces flapped in the yawning space below them. As long as they grabbed onto a protruding bit of rebar while they jumped between the boards, what was to be concerned about?

I asked a colleague how frequently construction workers were killed in Mexico. She sighed. She couldn’t look at the workers, said they made her feel sick.

All of this has raised two questions in me:

1. How is it possible to walk with on wobbly sticks of wood 15 stories up with the careless confidence of someone on the pavement below (where I have no doubt one of them will end up in time…)?

and

2. Just how much is a Mexican life worth, really?

I’m not very good at following through with promises

2008-06-20T13:14:00.001-04:00

A friend suggested I title my next blog post as above after a late night in the office led to a confusion of communication I’m not sure I fully understand. I’m going to oblige, attempting to shrug off the hostility that sentence invokes, because follow-through, or the lack thereof, is a huge part of the Foreigner In Mexico experience and probably deserves some blogtemplation.

I should start by admitting that I am hardly Little Miss Carved in Stone when it comes to plans. The reason for this is quite simple: I am often more tired than anyone realizes. I don’t think it’s normal, either, though I haven’t a clue what the problem is (I’m a horrible sleeper – could that be it?). However, were the world as I, the Great Wall would be the Half-Completed But Well-Intended Wall and Martin Luther King Jr. would have orated, “I have a dream! Can we talk about it in a bit?”

The average Mexican in general has a similar lack of follow-through, though it’s for a very cultural reason: they just cannot say no, nor do they tend to care particularly about where the little hand and the big hand are. Life is rather laissez-faire here, with things getting done most of the time but rarely as the clenched foreigner had envisioned them to unfold.

I give you an example.

Yesterday was my new job’s client development event, for which I had gone door to door in this luxury skyscraper inviting our new neighbours to our office housewarming. We sent out invites by email – Cocktail! Free food! We’d love to meet you! – to about 80 people, 38 of which RSVP’d that they’d see us there. By 5 o’clock, the official start time, no one had arrived. By 6 o’clock, midway through, there were maybe six people there. By 8 o’clock, an hour past the scheduled end time, there were four.

(The office staff, however, not wanting to see good food and wine go to waste, did a truly excellent job at scoffing back catering and alcohol for 60 people…)

The woman in charge of the event – a Canadian – was apoplectic at how abysmally the event had failed. I myself was baffled by the degree of Mexican amiable acceptance: you have to say yes even to a passive email? No one else was particularly surprised or bothered as long as the wine kept flowing.

I give you another example.

This past week, my incredible friend Rebeca took me and visiting Scottish lovely Marj down to Acapulco for a long weekend. To temper the cost of the five-star beachside resort, she also invited five other Mexican sundry friends and family.

Our second morning there, Marj and I had gotten up early enough to sup in the hotel restaurant. The six Mexicans, however, feeling a hankering for sopes (little soft tortilla disks with meat and beans and cheese), piled into their vehicles to “go next door quickly” while the palefaces readied themselves for an afternoon in the city. The crew returned just under four hours later, as the afternoon starting to fade away, to find a very overheated Canadian sullenly waiting for a taxi, screw ‘em, grumble grumble.

And a third example, delving back into the bitterness archives a little…

When I was just forming the idea of moving to Mexico, I realized very early on that I would not be capable of doing such a rash thing without some semblance of a rock to land on on the other side. To this end, I invested a great deal of time and money (including two separate visits to Mexico in the space of three months) communicating with a university that had expressed interest in hiring me for the September 2006 semester. My last visit here prior to my move, they showed me my tentative schedule and what would be my office. They shook my hand and said, “Welcome aboard!” They mentioned a couple paperwork things that would need to be done when I arrived in July.

And when I arrived in July? Nothing. No one even remembered me. A few people provided contradictory information on how I would go about doing the requisite paperwork, usually involving calling some third person who was never ever there. Eventually they stopped returning my calls entirely, leaving me in tears in the livingroom over what they hell was I supposed to do now.

Rude!, cry the foreigners. Unprofessional! Unreliable! If you don’t want to buy our products, don’t say you will! If you don’t want to warm our offices, warn us so we don’t order food for you! If you don’t want to hire me, don’t offer me a job! Gah! Gah! Gah!

I’m sure many Mexicans are comparably ruffled by the blunt rudeness and anal retentive timekeeping of foreigners. Certainly the sope-fuelled Mexicans returning mid-afternoon thought little of what to me had been a major transgression, with five of the six (the thoughtful Beka excepted) opting to just ignore the red-faced, puffed up foreigner altogether. I suppose rudeness is entirely subjective, based on personal sensitivities and mores: I was hostile at having had to wait for four hours; they were hostile that I was being so uptight while we were on holiday. And the university? I have no doubt that my increasingly frantic and numerous phone messages caused some hard feelings on their end.

That sound you hear is cultures clashing.

It does therefore cause mild confusion, if I may delve into the personal here for a moment, and if I may beg the tolerance of the friend in question who will likely someday read this, as to why the confusion yesterday evening resulted in the rather aggrieved suggestion that I title my next blog post after my own piteous lack of follow-through. Even if I had forgotten or neglected to call, isn’t “que sera, sera” the Mexican way of doing things?

But no venting at my friend’s expense, as the lesson is that we all must tread very carefully when dealing with other’s expectations. A Canadian can be late and a Mexican can be annoyed, entirely selfless and shockingly selfish can coexist in the same action, two people’s views on what a holiday to Acapulco should entail can vary dramatically. It’s going to happen and it’s going to be ugly – the challenge is to shrug and accept it.

Or, as Evangelina just quipped to me, “We have two jobs: to get angry and to stop being angry.”

Dressed to kill

2008-05-10T17:57:00.002-04:00

I miss heels.

Back in Toronto, I was a fairly elegant dresser. I wore skirts and fitted 40s style jackets, and clicked about in cute little stiletto boots and mary janes. Ok, so, it's true that my work shoes were ugly enough to incite my friend Ben to refuse to be seen with me while I was wearing them, but going out in the evenings involved some degree of effort. The work shoes were about comfort.

This has all changed. Now I dress... forgive me for the dire political incorrectness but, well, I've made the comparison on more than one occasion that I dress like your stereotypical dyke lesbian: for example, yesterday I wore an untucked tuxedo shirt, boot cut jeans and clogs. I also have very short fingernails, wear very little make-up and haven't changed my earrings in... well, never.

Which is all very ironic, really, given the importance placed on traditional gender roles here. The only time I wear skirts and heels anymore is for job interviews (though that shall stop - I got the job this morning!), where I am aware that I should girlie up in order to not alienate any macho men who expect girls to look like Girls. Then I tart myself up and everyone from my doorman to my colleagues to random people on the street say, "ooooooo, look at YOU," and I primp and pose and blush.

And it's not that I don't want to look girly or feel sassy and feminine, either. Obviously not, given how much I enjoy dressing up for interviews. The decline of my sense of style actually was the result of an acceptance of footwear realities: Mexican men tend to be very tiny and Mexican streets tend to be very choppy and Mexican weather tends to be very sticky and hot, and so, alas, my beloved stiletto boots were packed away in storage when I moved here. Needing comfortable shoes that didn't make me tower over everyone (which I do anyway), I opted for Converse and clogs, which in turn meant no more little flippy skirts and sassy little whatnots. Now it's all about the practical pants that don't emphasize the practical shoes too much, and boring boring boring zzzzzzzzzz.

Bleh.

I miss taking to the sidewalk dressed to kill, feline and powerful. I miss the attitude that dressing to emphasize the curves and the legs gave me. But my poor, long-betrayed feet have gotten used to all this arch-supported pampering, and heels now are excruciating within a couple of hours. And Mexican men still tend to the petite side. And the sidewalks are not getting better.

I need a middle ground.

Or a tall boyfriend who can hold me up as I totter down the crags and crumbles.

I need SOMETHING. This is getting ridiculous.

When the bell tolls.

2008-05-02T17:13:00.004-04:00

The Mexican concept of time is famous, known affectionately as "mañana, mañana" or "tomorrow, tomorrow."

My first Teach Yourself Spanish (or whatever it was called) book had a cultural note, actually, about Mexican time versus the rest of the Western world. The book jovially explained that there is an expression here - hora inglesa or "English time" - when you want to say that something is going to happen on the dot and not to be late. I've not once heard anyone use that particular expression - the closest I've heard is "at 8, but, like, REALLY at 8" - but it's a cute idea, such an affectionate Us and Them.

Indeed, Mexicans, as compared with Canadians, do have a certain... erm... loving disregard... for punctuality. I have come to understand that a 10am business meeting means they will show up somewhere between 10:30 and 11, or maybe 12, and my boss arriving before 11am is cause for tremendous shock amongst me and my colleagues. I, myself, have done the impossible and weaned myself from my pathological need to wear a watch through a combination of laziness (the watch battery died), poverty (there are things I need more than a new battery) and a settled acceptance that -ish time is more important that exact time.

Well, except I say all this but really what I think of as Mexican time - the "Mexican time" I've experienced and adjusted to - is really more of a quasi-Mexican time. You see, the vast majority of most closest friends here in Mexico are rather un-Mexican in that particular aspect. (Or perhaps they simply try a bit harder with their retentive Canadian friend? I should ask them sometime... ) Certainly, it's Pavel who leans on me to get out the door to make it to the movie in time, and Evangelina has shown up at my door on more than one occasion while I was still frantically brushing my teeth. Sure, yes, there are a handful of people in my life who make plans and never show up, or who show up hours late and unapologetic, but I tend to write those off as the jerks and move on.

(For the record, my friends are also distinctly un-Mexican in a couple of other aspects, such as: have you ever heard of a Mexican who doesn't like chile? It's so much fun when a server warns me, the iron-stomached guera, about a dish's fiery goodness and it's Mexican Evangelina who, with gratitude, chooses something milder. Her brother, apparently, doesn't eat beans. Next thing they'll be telling me they don't wear ponchos and ride burros!)

It is currently 4:30pm on Friday afternoon, a little over halfway through the timeslot given by Cablevision for the technician to come repair our blitzy cable. (He has until 6.) We mutually agreed upon this time last Saturday, when I went all the way down to a Cablevision office to ask them for help following a saturation of expensive cellphone calls (we don't have a landline) for directions that proved unhelpful.

I am watching the little hand move around the clock with mild but still palpably increasing anxiety. Technically he has an hour and a half left, I remind myself. Technically our cable has been out for over a month now and I've survived just fine so another weekend without it wouldn't make any difference, I tell myself. Technically I'm not in Canada so I can't just assume that, when a company says to me, "sit around your house and wait for us from 2pm to 6pm," that that means they will actually show up, I try to convince myself.

And, really, I should know better.

Backwards, one week.

The Wednesday before last, Luz y Fuerza cut our power off for non-payment. I was standing at the door of the building when the guy literally took massive scissors and cut the actual wire (I always thought "cut off" was a euphemism for flicking a switch, whaddayaknow) but he wouldn't talk to me and listen to my desperate pleas that we had, in fact, paid, and I had the receipt to prove it because... well, honestly I don't really know why he wouldn't talk to me. He just snipped and ran.

Thursday morning Pavel and I spent nearly three and a half hours in our community Luz y Fuerza branch, whereupon the disaffected youth behind the counter examined our receipt, confessed they'd cut us off by accident, and promised someone would be by the next day to reconnect us. I complained about two days without power when we'd paid, damn it, while Pavel just smirked.

No one came on Friday, of course. Pavel knew that. He wasn't even surprised when I told him.

Whereas I, all puffed up in my Canadian fury - "but you promised!!!" - called the Luz y Fuerza customer service line to demand something be done tonight. The surprisingly unapologetic and surprisingly uninterested man on the other end merely remarked, repeatedly, after every attempt of mine to make him see what a travesty this was, that my best bet would be to go back to the office on Monday morning and maybe speak to a manager this time. I hung up with a spat out, "pendejos!", which made the guy at the phonebooth next to me (remember: no home phone) giggle.

The silver lining of this story: I successfully executed my first angry consumer phone call in a foreign language, thank you very much.

So, when examining the odds of Mr. Cable Repair Man actually showing up in the... oh... one hour and 18 minutes he has left - "you promised!!!" - I should take into account the fact that all of this chaos with Luz y Fuerza happened a week and a half ago and THEY STILL HAVEN'T SHOWN UP. The reality is: if it weren't for a friend with a wrench and quick fingers, I would be without power to this very day.

Man, I so owe that kid a beer. Seven beers: one for every additional day I would have been without the power I'd paid for were it not for him. To date.

Pavel doesn't think the cable guy is going to show and I am starting to come round to that opinion myself. The challenge will be to not get all heated and tormented if this most likely of occurrences occurs, but rather to smile and laugh and say, "Ah, Mexico" while I crack open a Corona (ok, I don't drink beer but "Coca Light" doesn't have the same ring to it) chilled by stolen power.

4:52pm. One hour and 8 minutes.

Breathe.

Aaaaaaaaaand... go!

2008-04-29T12:34:00.002-04:00

My friend Lise, attempting to console herself about her impending return to Canada after a mere six months in Mexico, wrote herself a list of things about this country that she would absolutely not miss for a moment. This included, but was not limited to, the relentless noise, the aggressive men, and the inclusion of tubas in all traditional music.

Now, on several of these factors, she might have a point. There are certainly a lot of tubas in the music, although I, for one, find this charming in a Walter Ostanek kind of way. And, yes, the meat here does tend to be on the fatty side, at least in the tacos, and this would be all the more distressing for a vegetarian such as Lise.

But she missed one. A big one. My big one.

The traffic.

Mexico City traffic defies logic. This is not a simple equation of poor civic planning (those silly unforeseeing Aztecs) coupled with vehicular over-saturation, this is poor civic planning combined with vehicular over-saturation magnified a thousandfold by that heady Mexican vigour that enables Mexican parents to pile their young children into the back of their pickup truck and for window cleaners to lean over the roof ledge without a harness. Mexicans make Montrealers look like demure grannies out for a Sunday drive through the country.

This is... MADNESS.

I am growing hostile with my morning walk to work. It is a step-by-step process, each level requiring increased courage and recklessness.

First there is Avenida Chapultepec, a four-section, ten-lane, honking, howling monstrosity. It is a living game of Frogger, save the ability to jump on top of the logging trucks for safety. The first section is generally easy, the second not so bad. The third is where I recently wandered confidently through the parked cars only to be smacked by a speeding motorcycle. The fourth gives me nightmares.

Then there is Paseo de la Reforma, a.... wait for it... four-section, ten-lane, honking, howling monstrosity. It's actually not as bad as Avenida Chapultepec as there is - gasp and awe - a crosswalk that most drivers seem to acknowledge across the inner two sections, but the outer two sections are a frustrating game of spot the gap.

Finally, there is Tolstoi, the smallish street at the base of my office building that unfortunately links two major streets and thus is a swirling mass of moving metal at all times. It's one-way, with cars turning left across my pedestrian path. It's short so you don't have much warning when a car is going to turn left. It's high speed.

Walking to work means taking my life into my own hands on a daily basis.

The problem is that vehicular traffic is king. At a corner? You do not have the right of way. At a crosswalk? You do not have the right of way. At a crosswalk with a red light and stopped cars and a little blinking man telling you to go ahead? You absolutely do NOT have the right of way, don't even think about it.

Forget violent crime and poisonous toxic - THIS is the real danger of Mexico City.

Three lanes morphing into four, five... six.
Microbus drivers climbing the curbs to get around stopped cars.
Motorcycles and scooters whizzing through the gaps, knees millimeters from mirrors.
Merging culture that involves just go, the oncoming cars will move out of the way.

HOOOOONKING.

Mexico is noisy? There's the primary culprit.

The light at Tolstoi is long, in favour of the people turning left. Inevitably, the people waiting to go straight through on Tolstoi will get tired of waiting. And start honking. At a red light.

No, not honking. Not beepbeepbeep pay attention to me, I'm getting impatient to go, but as if the driver has had an impatience-related coronary and collapsed on his steering wheel, releasing one long continuous blast of noise that will continue without interruption until the stoplight has made note of his displeasure and dutifully changed to green.

My old boss, Michael, once remarked to me that, once I'm comfortable here, I will get over my fear of driving and fit right in.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Not on your life, Michael. Or, rather, not on MY life. Walking is dangerous enough, thank you very much.

I guarantee I have learned some terrible habits for whenever I finally leave Mexico.

PUM.

2008-02-20T11:32:00.002-05:00

Mexico is SO dangerous, they tell me. Foreigns and Mexicans.

Less than Houston, sure, but pretty darn bad. I could die here.

I've never been terribly concerned about dying here, to be honest. Whereas in Rio de Janeiro I nearly hyperventilated when I exited a subway station only to realize it was already dark and I had not a clue in which direction to find my hostel, Mexico City does not make me nervous. My general thinking is that, if I stay out of the bad neighbourhoods and leave my sparkling diamonds at home and don't get completely wasted before picking a fight with the local bouncer whose girlfriend I just unsuccessfully invited back to my hotel room, I should be fine. Muggings excepted.

In fact, there are only two things here that make me nervous: my morning game of Frogger across the eight-lane through-way of Avenida Chapultepec and the toxic slew of chemicals I've come to know as "air."

And here's why I'm not so afraid:

At 2:40 pm on Friday, February 15th, a man blew up about six blocks from my house. Initial reports were that he had noticed a plastic bag on the street, bent down to look at it and blammo.

To which I responded to my girlfriend with incredulity, "Really? Totally innocent?"

See, there really is no such thing as crossfire here. The drug cartels are like Hollywood mafiosos, orchestrating their hits with such theatrical precision as to make them intellectually fascinating: heads rolled out onto dancefloors, jubilant thank you notes for sending the victims, dramatic scenes of carnage and demonstrations of power. Assumedly there are gangs - a quick Google search brings up stories of rampaging Mexican youth and fleeing Hondurans trailed by angry Central American gang members - but they are hardly the stuff of legend north of the border. The druglords here know that mowing down a 15 year old seeking Boxing Day bargains will not send the same message as abducting and beheading the son of the President.

Also, Mexico has no fear of international terrorism, assumedly because Mexico is not the remotest bit interested in being a part of the War On nor does it emit the image of being among the Western Devil countries. Safely occupied with its own struggles with poverty and corruption and Latin Americanism, Mexico does not present a logical target for Al Qaeda, so no worries of mass bombings in transit systems or a plane smacking into Torre Latinoamericano.

So the very concept that this poor man bent down and POOF was hard to conceive of. Why would anyone have left a bomb on the street on a Friday afternoon? Who were they hoping to kill? It was not terrifying so much as it was... confusing. Had I been wrong all along?

The story's unfolding now, in true Mexican graphic style (yesterday I saw a photo of the victim's charred and gaping head). The guy? Not so innocent. Carrying the bomb, in fact, and wearing two layers of clothing for the likely purpose of being able to plant and disappear. Had the cellphone trigger on him as well, which gives rise to the morbidly humourous idea that someone sent him a text message (Pável hilariously suggests on his blog a post-Valentine's apology from his wife: "Gordito, ya perdóname. Vamos por unas quecas al rato, ¿quieres?").

The young woman seriously injured in the explosion, wailing from her hospital bed that she knows nothing about anything, I'm innocent! innocent!, was captured on a security camera walking arm in arm with the guy, seconds before the explosion.

The young man moderately injured, sadly, does appear to have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thankfully, he'll be fine.

No one's sure yet where the couple was going or who, exactly, they were, although speculation is that they had been hired by the Sinaloa cartel to bomb the nearby police station in retribution for having lost a key cartel figure to the hands of justice that Wednesday. The bomb, however, was poorly made and even more poorly handled, and the shocking little spatter of accidental carnage has not inspired anyone to claim responsibility. No wonder, really, as little fear can be spread with the message, "Watch out or we will send badly trained henchmen with ineffective ballistics after you!"

So I continue to not be terribly afraid of this city. With little inclination to get myself involved in the drug cartels or the police/justice/political anti-cartel crusade, my biggest threat remains the Wild West lawlessness of Mexican driving culture. Green light, red light - what's the difference? God speed, young pedestrian.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrel

2008-02-18T16:42:00.001-05:00

(This is going to be long but I want to have it down for posterity.)

The last thirty-one and a half years have taught me one thing: if a life lesson is to be imparted, it's going to cost me.

Like everyone, I make mistakes. Some big, some small. Some easily dismissive, some legendary. But unlike almost everyone, the consequences of these mistakes do not take a myriad of forms, such as but not limited to physical injury, loss of opportunity, loss of possessions, delays, hurt feelings. No, for me, consequences all just have a price tag.

Here's my latest one, not so much to do with Mexico but certainly the sociopolitical climate of Mexico led to its existence.

I belong to an online community of travellers by the name of Hospitality Club. The group operates like a combination of online dating and eBay: all members have profiles with which you decide if they're the kind of people you'd like to meet, and you leave comments for those you have met. Travellers go to the members in their destination cities and scour the profiles for potential friends, send emails, you meet for coffee or dinner or a tour through a museum or whatever, it's fun and stimulating and challenging.

When I first joined, I was wary. Trusting complete strangers is not an easy thing to do, and posting personal information online is not always wise (says the blogger). I joined slowly, in stages, but it wasn't until a young German woman with 100+ ravingly positive comments wrote me that I decided to take the leap. Screw it, I thought, I'm going to trust until someone gives me reason not to.

It's a truly excellent site indeed: over the years, I have met close to 100 individual people from all around the world, some of whom I can't imagine there was a time I didn't know them. My friendship with Pavel, actually, is a direct result of this site - he was my very first host, two years ago. And, sure, I've met people where I was anticipating saying goodbye with some fervour, but all in all it's been great.

Now, as a female in a big city, I get a lot of requests. I host very very few of them, opening up only to those who really click with me in their emails. The rest I will scan their profiles and, unless something strikes me as odd or unappealing, I will say to them, "hey, sorry I can't host you but let's meet up for coffee, my cell number is..."

The Saturday before Christmas, a German guy calls me on my cell. "Hey, it's Friedrich the German, from Hospitality Club!" he says, "I'm in Mexico City, let's do coffee!"

Sure, I say, but I'm doing laundry right now and need to go to the grocery store. Can it be tomorrow, Sunday?

I rack my brains for memory of a German guy. Yes, I believe there was one who said he had a hotel and didn't need a host but wanted to meet for coffee.

Friedrich calls me Sunday. "Hey, it's Friedrich the German, from Hospitality Club! Shall we meet for coffee?"

Sounds good, I say. When and where? I ask him how he's enjoying Mexico City. Very nice, he says, loving it. We're laughing a lot, he's very nice.

Then the phone goes dead.

He calls me back twenty minutes later. He is frantic, inconsolable. "They just stole my wallet!" he said, "Oh shit, they just stole my wallet!"

I tell him not to panic and I offer him my computer to cancel his cards. He's going on and on and on about shit shit shit, I didn't think, I put my bag on top of the phone and these two guys and oh shit shit shit. I'm hushing and reassuring, give him my address and tell him I'll pay the cabfare.

When he arrives at my house, he's this well-dressed man in his mid-40s, very sweet. He shows me a photocopy of his passport to prove that it's him: the photo looks Latino, which I comment on and he blinks innocently and says, "Really? It's me!"

Man, retelling this story is reawakening my feelings of being the biggest chump to have ever chumped. How many red flags does one need?

The German is thanking me endlessly for letting him use my computer, canceling his card and commenting angrily that the bastards already got 500 Euro out of his account. We sit and chat and strategize, while he chain smokes and pets the cat. No one warned him about Mexico, he says, so I tell him the commiserating story of my robbery last year. He describes the robbery in detail: two guys, grab and run and split up, Friedrich tried to chase after but they were just so darn fast. I feel so horrible for him. I am sad that his first experience in this incredible city is the stereotypical one.

He then looks at me square in the eye and says apologetically, "If I do a online money transfer right now into your account, could you lend me a little until I can get my replacement cards?"

I balk but the fact was that he had asked me at the only point in time that there was a chance I would say yes. Not only was I feeling all sorts of sorry for him, and not only was it Christmas, but at that moment I had $500 cash sitting in an envelope in my room, an unexpected and unbudgeted for Christmas bonus from a boss renowned for her unethical money withholding. So I concede, frugally only offering him $200 of it.

Yes, kids, this is the point wherein you throw your hands up in the air and howl for my stupidity. But, really, wouldn't you have done the same thing? No? Really no?

But he even let me watch the wire transfer, copying the details into a Word file on my desktop!

Still no?

To thank me for my kindness, he invites me for lunch the next day. I show up with a French guy, another guest from this site, and the three of us have a lovely lunch. He didn't get his new cards, he says, because it's Christmas proper now (it's the 24th) but he has spoken with his bank and they can send him the money in Puerto Vallarta, where he is to meet his girlfriend that evening. He produces a very formal looking printout from Deutschebank that says he has now transfered 500 Euro into my account, but to his dismay I don't have my bank card on me. The French guy gives him another $100, under the agreement that I will pay him back when we get back to my place. So, all in all, the German Asshat now has $300 of my money, plus the cab fare.

I'm not sure at which point I started to twig that something didn't smell right. His hotel in Puerto Vallarta did tell me that there was no one there by the name on the money transfer report, when I called to let him know it hadn't gone through, but I somehow managed to override the oddity of that. I also tried emailing him at the address on the transfer slip and it bounced, but somehow that was only marginally concerning. Every time a nagging little fear poked up its head, I would think, "But he kept calling me! Why would a scam artist have returned? Wouldn't he have just run with the $300 he got and find a new victim?" And he was so nice, besides, that it just wasn't possible.

But I knew. I did. I didn't want to admit it, but I think I knew right from the moment I was fishing that first $200 out of my Christmas bonus envelope. I just didn't want to offend him but implying that I didn't trust him.

How Canadian of me, alas.

Now imagine the moment of temporary relief when I run into him in the new year. I collapsed into his arms and exclaimed, "Oh thank god! I thought you were a scam artist!" He smiled and hugged me back warmly and said that he'd just gotten into town and was going to call me later that day.

Oh stop rolling your eyes, you. I can sense it even as I type this. Hindsight is 20/20, remember.

He tells me he's in room 407 at the Hotel Miguel Angel, although he was thinking of changing rooms because there had been a hot water problem. He says, hey, let's meet at 6 tonight for dinner and so I can give you your money back!

He calls at 4 - he's going to the pyramids to see the sunset, but how about lunch tomorrow?

He calls the next morning - he's going to Puebla for the day, but how about dinner on Monday?

He calls on Monday at 4pm - we on for dinner? "Yes!" I say. "Ok," he says, "I'm just heading back to the hotel now. I'll call you in an hour."

I never hear from him again.

Tuesday Pavel sends me the link to a forum topic on the Hospitality Club site, where a Mexican member has written:

Recently I recived a telephone call, to request me Help. From a german man, that say that he is member of this comunity.. I check my profi and i can saw him... He told me that his Wallet were stoled, and he ask me about if I can change some euros, but if he dosnt have his wallet, why have Euros?? later he rectify and said me, "I lost all my credits cards" and we can do a transfer....what?? Yeah!! give me local money and i´ll do transfer... is it normal?? I dont guess.. Some has heard histories like that??

I nearly throw up.

I ask my colleague, Evangelina, to call Hotel Miguel Angel and ask for him. They say they have no one there with that name. She says Room 407, German, hot water problem. They say, sorry, there is no hot water problem in Room 407 and they haven't had a German guest for a month.

I write to the forum guy and ask for confirmation of the German's Hospitality Club nickname. It's a match. Several people, in fact, are reporting having been called by a German saying that his wallet has been stolen and could they exchange local money for a wire transfer.

You know, in hindsight, his offer makes absolutely no sense. Western Union could do the same thing, no?

So lesson learned, sort of. In all reality, I refuse to learn a lesson from all this. In a world of distrust and cynicism and fear, isn't something like Hospitality Club that much MORE important? I would like to think that, were I in trouble in a foreign country, someone would be willing to help me. And I would rather be scammed again than refuse help to someone legitimately in need.

I've just got to be a little more careful in the future, you know?

Let's talk about sex, baby.

2008-01-29T15:21:00.001-05:00

A very long absence from blogging, due for the most part of mental over-taxation caused by rapidly deteriorating desire to spend another minute in my job. But no more complaints about the job, at least for now or at least until something has changed. This blog is [no longer, thank god] a place for Erika to air her oft petty grievances.

Instead, I shall talk about sex.

(Let's face it, off the blog pages, I'm always talking about sex anyway. Fascinating subject, really.)

More than a year ago, I wrote on how I perceived Mexican women as on the edge of revolution, predicting stridently that the social shape of Mexico in 20 years would be almost unrecognizable from the social shape of Mexico today. "Mexican women," I wrote (although I'm paraphrasing because I'm too lazy to go look it up), "say yes or no to sex with a liberation not yet achieved by their northern sisters."

I was wrong.

I think a large part of my error came from a pendulum swing, the result of having somehow subconsciously bought into the virgin/whore dichotomy presented by Hollywood depictions of Mexico. I believe now that I came to Mexico thinking that, while those lusty Brazilians were out tossing back the caipirinhas and shagging happily, Mexican women were... what?... being wives and mothers, mostly willing captives of the Mexican machismo.

And I say I believed that then because, on some level, I think I still believe that now. After being warned not to tell people I live with a man, lest they think that I'm some brazen hussy, it still surprises me when I learn that a female friend of mine is not a virgin. In fact, of the female friends I have whom I am close enough to to know that degree of private information, none of them are. Not a single one.

And so I, in my enthusiasm and shattering presuppositions, proclaim loudly the sexual liberation of the Mexican female. They live in a culture that tells them that the most womanly of all women was a virgin AND a mother, I rejoiced, yet they themselves are liberated in their sexuality! How marvellous! How admirable!

That I went on to condemn Canadian woman for perceived lack of sexual liberation is fascinating, in hindsight. Do I know any virgins in Canada, either?

Only in the past month have I realized my overcompensation for my original image. The virgin and the whore, they are alive and well in Mexico.

As a white, foreign female in Mexico, I've been told, many people will assume I am a easy shag. This, much like my media-cultivated mental image of the primly dressed señorita, is from Girls Gone Wild videos: during Spring Break in Cancún, the locals flee the inundation of drunk, horny frat boys and sorority girls looking to paaaaaaaaar-tay, woooooooooooo, show us your tits! We also laugh a lot, said the Mexican doctor once, which makes sense given the quantity alcohol consumed.

Mexican men have a similar reputation, bordering on obligation, for sexual flagrancy. This goes beyond the Latin Loh-ver (few Mexicans fit into that smooth-talking, heart-breaking, pirate shirt-clad stereotype, really) but appears almost a part of the social concept of masculinity. Have penis, will shag. Married? Shag more discreetly.

As a result, my sexual life is of no concern to the Mexicans around me: I am already a whore and the Mexicans I am assumedly philandering with are just doing their testosterone-fueled duty.

Mexican women, however, are not so lucky.

My assessment that Mexican women having sex with their boyfriends equals Mexican women are sexually liberated was a gross and highly ignorant oversimplification of the real equation. Yes, it's true that my female friends are not virgins, and several have told me of covert nights in hotels (they all live at home, see) in order to be able to have a little hankypanky. And, yes, more than a few of them have talked about one night stands and casual sex. In fact, place Typical Canadian Female Friend against Typical Mexican Female Friend and you wouldn't see a whole lot of difference in their tally sheets.

But the notches are misleading, and it seems the Virgin of Guadalupe continues to watch over the Mexican women through her heavy-lidded eyes of sorrowful purity. Of the women I've talked sex with, not a single one has been entirely at peace with it. One struggled with the idea of spending the night in the bed of a pretty stranger, only to give in and then flee from him during the night before she be found by the other people in the house. Another expressed gratitude that her casual fling had resulted in a serious relationship. A third confessed to having never had an orgasm with any of her lovers, due, she thought, to confused feelings about whether she was allowed to enjoy it.

(I, incidentally, am relishing my position as sage dish-er out of counsel, drawing on the legacy of my pale-skinned sister whores...)

Sexual liberation with emotional freedom. An increased use of the birth control pill but a continuing reluctance to demand that your protesting partner put on a condom lest he think you don't love him. Something that you can do but not talk about, that you can do but not enjoy. All those years of teaching the sex is wrong, sex is for the man, ricocheting around in these poor, beautiful, sensual women's heads.

And I thought Canadian youth were pumped full of the erroneous message that "men want sex, women give sex"! Here, the adage that "men give love for sex and women give sex for love" is almost a mantra.

(I feel I must pause for a minute here and dutifully note that, of course, not everyone falls into these lines of thought. Without effort, I can think of several men and several women who appear to run counter to these generalizations, and at least one of the women I can think of appears none the worse for wear for her bucking of social mores. I also write from a deeply Mexico City-centric viewpoint, and am quite aware that what goes on in this megalopolis is likely not being mirrored in the small rural towns.)

So. Erika has revised her cry of revolution accordingly. I still believe that this generation of quasi-heathens, shrugging off the doleful faces of their parents' deities in favour of more individual thought and action, are at the forefront of a dramatic shift in the social make-up of Mexican society. When so much of a society's conservative mores are based on adherence to a religion that teaches humility, virginity and quiet suffering, the decline of active devotion will mean a rebellion against those same values. Some will argue the changes will be for the better, others, for the worse, of course, but it is undeniable that the changes are coming.

And I, for one, am ready to welcome my Mexican sisters into the hallowed ranks of the Western whore, provided that they are willing to hang up their guilt and shame once and for all at the door. Do or not do, as some wise green critter once said, just don't listen to anyone but yourself when making that decision.

Statistics of slavery

2007-10-14T19:18:00.000-04:00

Pavel, the dear boy, has brought to my attention some statistics on Mexican labour culture for your enlightenment. So, my dear friends of similar cultural laziness, here is the numerical evidence for my constant lowing about low pay and long hours:

From Expansion, July 12, 2006, from a survey of 477 Mexican managers and executives:

How many hours do you work in a day?

Less than 8 - 4%
8 or 9 - 16%
10 - 42%
12 - 21%
More than 12 - 15%
No response - 2%

(Erika's Shock Factor Commentary: that would make 78% of people working 10 hours or more per day.)

Which of these phrases do you identify with the most?

I work too much - 49%
I work an appropriate amount - 41%
I work less than I should - 7%
No response - 3%

(Erika's Shock Factor Summary: even though only 4% work less than 8 hours a day, 7% think they should work more.)

I would like to go home earlier.

Yes - 84%
Not necessary - 14%
No response - 2%

(Erika's Shock Factor Commentary: so why don't they?... wait for it...)

My company/boss rewards...

When I meet my goals - 64%
Extra hours in the office - 31%
No response - 4%

(Erika's Shock Factor Commentary: 31% of people being rewarded SOLEY for extra time served...)

A quote from Yanis Raptis, director of Right Management: "The boss will say you are committed if you leave late."

A joke if you leave at 7 at night: "What, you're taking the afternoon off?"

The hours I dedicate to my job allow me to have a personal life and time with my family:

Yes - 56%
No - 41%
No response - 3%

The hours I spend at work are a problem with my partner or family:

Sometimes - 60%
Always - 13%
Never - 25%
No response - 2%

(Erika's Shock Factor Commentary: I am a lazy git by Mexican standards.)

Sad, isn't it?

Caveat emptor, bloody hell.

2007-10-13T19:10:00.000-04:00

Many years ago, a product called The Abtronic hit the Canadian market to fairly widespread joy. Strapped around your waist while you sat placidly watching television or reading, the machine would send electrical stimuli into your abdominal muscles, causing them to tense and relax and tense and relax and tense and releax. “The benefits of crunches without the exertion!” promised ab-chiseled men and women in lycra.

I know several people who bought one of these devices (so no judgment, if you were one of them), managing to override their usual “too good to be true skepticism” in the hopes of steely abs without that queasy ache of 300 nightly crunches. Then the class-action lawsuits started appearing, people claiming that they had used the product exactly as specified and nothing was happening, nary an eight-pack in sight.

Eventually the makers of The Abtronic were forced to knuckle under Canada’s rather stringent truth in advertising laws, admitting publicly that, as abdominal muscles are in constant movement through breathing, talking and laughing, a simple muscle tense without resistance would have no effect on muscle tone. The hammer fell and everyone who bought the Abtronic had their money dutifully refunded.

And so a lesson was re-learned: come on people, if it seems too good to be true, then really, seriously, we mean it, believe us, it probably is.

I really support truth in advertising laws. While I consider myself a relatively savvy consumer (What’s that, screaming consumer debt? Yeah, yeah, I hear you.), it’s comforting to know that advertisers must temper their marketing slogans with some semblance of reality. We’re still not protected from the barrage of liminal and subliminal messages, mind: it remains up to us to realize that Dove’s noble pro-female self-esteem advertising campaigns are made by the same people as those utterly offensive and rabidly sexist Axe bodyspray ads, and that, ultimately, the purpose of both is just to sell more products. It’s more like buyer be informed, more than buyer beware.

Enter Mexico, oh Mexico. It does not appear that Mexico has truth in advertising laws to protect the good people from their own blind trust and optimistic hopes (and, let’s face it, laziness, because what else drives the desire for a machine that creates rock-hard abs without more exertion than required to raise the next salt and vinegar chip to your mouth?).

I present, for your reading pleasure, three examples of this blatant disregard for truth, all of which fall in that most predatory of categories: weight loss.

First, we have the Slender Shaper: a belt, much like the Abtronic except capable of strapping onto any of your problem areas, that shakes your jiggles around until they magically disappear. Now, anyone who’s seen the television footage from the 1950s with those wiggly belt machines, and who’s noticed that those wiggly belt machines can no longer be found in gyms and spas, might suspect that the mere act of wiggling is not productive. Oh, but no! promises the cheery (male) voice-over, splicing an image of a woman with the Slender Shaper at work on her hip/rear area with the image of a slim, taut woman doing the salsa. The argument: Slender Shaper will not only give you the slim, taut body of a regular salsa dancer but it will do it faster because the machine makes you jiggle 20 times as fast as dancing! WOW.

Second, we have a machine that I’ve forgotten the name of so we’ll call it the Heat Slimmer: another belt, but this one producing heat instead of jiggling, and, again, recalling weight loss machines of the 50s that are no longer around anymore for suspicious reasons. But oh no! promises the cheery (male) voice-over, and they’ll prove it: they place a fair-sized pat of butter on top of the heating pad and exclaim delightedly as it melts away. So, too, will *your* fat! WOW!

Third, and finally, we have The Patch (again, I’ve forgotten the real name): it is, quite simply, a patch. Weary woman in black and white, attempting to jog awkwardly, collapses against a tree with her hand on her heaving side. Weary woman in black and white, on the verge of frustrated tears, swipes a pile of diet pill containers off her kitchen table with one arm swoop. Weary woman in black and white is fed up with machines that don’t work. And then! Weary woman in colour, slaps a little white three-inch squared white patch on her curvy rear end. Animation in colour (voice-over by cheery male) shows us how the patch sends little – what? they never do say – in through the skin, the little green arrows of whatever it is breaking up the fat cells just like that, *snap*. Skinny woman that bears absolutely no resemblance to weary woman looks in mirror and marvels at the fit of her skinny jeans, all thanks to the patch of wonder. WOW!!

(On a sidenote, isn’t it amusing how the Before people in these ads are always so helpless? They have a folding table up for sale here – just a simple white dealie – and the black and white Before people are fumbling, dropping things, sighing and wringing their hands as if a normal folding table is Just So Difficult. Poor sods.)

Well, that’s three, but let me throw one eye-roller in that doesn’t involve weight loss: a plastic, battery-powered portable light bulb that you can take around the house in case of a blackout (a fairly regular occurrence in a city of 22 power-draining souls). One of its selling features: it doesn’t use electricity! WOW. Except… um… the batteries?

No, I can’t stop, one more, and back to weight loss: chubby, unloveable woman uses some Ask Your Doctor product and manages to drop all that pesky unwanted weight. Suddenly she has a handsome husband and kids, and, apparently, based on the slow-motion hand-in-hand running with dashing man, access to a beach and some designer clothes. Because what would YOU do with a few pounds less?

Okay, that last one is not unique to Mexico, admittedly. Being made to feel as if your particular brand of floor cleaner is standing in the way of your finding a husband/proof that you are a bad mother/threatening your very existence by not killing every single germ known to man is a pretty common ploy. No one is ever going to be able to look me in the eye and defend advertising as anything other than a bunch of people trying to sell a product by any means necessary, but all this blatant misrepresentation – no! worse! outright lying! - just… well… it’s pretty hilarious.

Pity those poor souls who actually think, “Wow! Look at that butter! My fat cells and bovine milk products are EXACTLY the same thing! Where is my chequebook?”

Blessed are the meek

2007-09-28T20:29:00.000-04:00

Back home, I was a bit of a pushover. My stepmother once told me that, upon realizing that she was going to end up in the role of parent and role model, she felt compelled to try to buck some of the passivity out of me. I’m not sure she managed, though she did give it the old college try.

Now, passivity is not a foreign concept to most Canadians. While my Northern European mother froths and fumes at the money-grubbing, power-hungry North American society, the fact remains that Canada is not exactly composed of the Take Chargers that make up our neighbours to the south. Which is not to say that we’re serene, not by any means; we are just a country of screamers unwilling to take that scream to the streets lest we wake someone up who’s had a long day at the office and might be trying to sleep.

Lump on top of that cultural identity my own little package of neuroses about stirring things up too much, and you don’t get much of a force to be reckoned with. Sure, I’ve been known to blow a gasket and rage at someone, but that rage is taken back within minutes of the initial explosion and turned into a rather pervasive sense of regret and groveling apology. I have trouble asking for money because I’m not entirely sure if I deserve it, and I have trouble asking for help because I’m not entirely sure it’s not too much to ask. My therapist once howled at me, “For goodness sakes, girl! Stick up for yourself sometimes!”, to which I probably quaked and mewled “But hoooow?”

So imagine my surprise when Pavel tells me I’m aggressive.

Jaw on floor. What? Me? What? How?

My boss and I are tense with each other, and have been since the day she handed me a cheque for $200 and called it my monthly salary. Raising my Canadian eyebrow and stamping my little First World foot, I successfully threatened to quit until she upped it to a borderline liveable wage. To this day I periodically march into her office and demand validation and motivation. Meanwhile, my lovely co-worker Poncho, 27 years old and university educated, sits meekly in his office, earning what she tried to pay me, being called the names she tries to call me, working 12+ hour days, all without a peep.

I’ve been chalking this difference up to labour culture: Poncho doesn’t want to quit or risk being fired by challenging his payrate and level of respect because this is a good job, by many standards, and there is a good chance there isn’t another one out there for him. Me, I can toss my hair back and tell her all manner of inventive places to stick her exploitative employment because I have the refuge of Canada to flee to if I get called on my bluff.

Okay, I’ve not actually told her to shove it. I’ve thought it, certainly, and I’ve been very creative with her options, but I’ve not yet said it out loud. Yet.

What I’m starting to realize now is that it’s a combination of the labour culture – where decent jobs are few and far between – and of general Mexican culture. Poncho wants very very badly to stand before G the Great and Terrible and demand a fair wage and fairer working hours, and in fact has gone so far as to commend me on my success in those areas, but he just doesn’t know how. No clue.

And when I combine this with the fact that most Mexicans will say yes even if they mean maybe or no, and will give you directions helpfully even if they don’t know where it is you’re going, and will (according to the stories of my friend, who spent several years building homes in communities in need) cook up their only chicken for a guest even if it means no more eggs for awhile, I can’t help but notice a pattern emerging: Mexicans are crap at not being the nicest people possible.

Some of this is due to the average Mexican actually, legitimately, wanting to make you happy. “Claro que si!” is not a manipulative lie to keep you guessing, it’s the Mexican wanting to assure you that things actually *can* work out the way you want them too. You are worth the honour of the chicken, in their eyes, and it will make them happy to share their very best with you.

But I have a theory that, wrapped up in all this effort at goodness, there is also a bit of power submission going on, regardless of who the other person is. A submission entrenched into Mexican society, perhaps, by the worship of a god figure being venerated precisely for the meek and submissive way he allowed himself to be quietly tortured to death.

I’ve written extensively already about Mexican Catholicism because of my own voyeuristic bewilderment at some of the images presented as inspiration. Yet, while I myself don’t understand my flayed to the bone Jesus figure in the main cathedral, the message is quite clear: look how this man suffered! Jesus is the lamb, the one who forgave all manner of abuses, who spilled a great deal of blood and tears in order to make the world a better place. The meek shall inherit the earth, and camels will get through eyes of needles before the rich will get their.

The whole Catholic religion, it could be argued, promotes submissive humility: penance, for example, can only come from admitting to another human being your most shameful thoughts and deeds. And, if 89% of Mexicans still define themselves as practicing Catholics (a number that, mark my words, will decline dramatically in the next two decades as my comparably heathen generation rears their own heathen children), this submissive humility is going to be deeply entrenched in the social identity.

Against this backdrop, yes, I suppose I am aggressive. Struggling against my own perceived apathy, the message I’ve heard all my life is how fortune favours the brave or, if you want to bring God into it, God helps those who help themselves. So, while I’m not exactly winning leadership awards up in Canada, down here where the scale is so so different, I’m almost off the charts.

It’s all really quite fascinating.

Blind trust

2007-09-28T18:51:00.000-04:00

This is a bit sad and a bit scary, but also a bit funny and that makes it blog-worthy, I feel.

I've been casually browsing new places to live (for reasons not in this blog because that's not really the point of this blog and, besides, I'm tired of talking about it) , mostly using Craig's List because Craig's List is keen. Wednesday I sent out a few exploratory emails, including one in response to an ad for a shared apartment in the lovely neighbourhood of Condesa for US$360 a month.

She replies immediately:

okay send the the 400 to the western union info below

Robert Paul
Address in Wisconsin

via wester union and i will ask my client there to handle over the key to you as soon as i confirm your payment here and after sending the money remember to send your name and address along the western union so that i can forward that to my client who is going to handle over the key to you okay
Thanks and best regards

Alas, I think, she's already rented the room out and she's sent me the email by mistake. So I send her an email to this effect.

She replies:

Thanks for the advise you have given but i am here telling you that you should have no fear dealing with me am the land lord of the house and you are dealing with me so the client is the one who will attend to you and give you the key to the room and its there it with you central noord and all you need is just to make the payment to me and immediately i confirm the payment from western union the i will instruct him to bring the and show you the room thats is how it goes so if you are interested to make the payment here is my western union info of where the money will be send to again
NAME.....Robert Paul
ADDRESS.....Wisconsin

Thanks and best regards

waiting for the payment confirmation

"As IF!" I scoff to myself. Why on earth would anyone even consider Western Union-ing US$400 to some random stranger in the United States before even seeing the apartment, not to mention meeting the roommates and signing a contract! And what's with this promise to give me the key as soon as the money is received? Does she not care who I am? Everything about it screams SCAAAAAAAM.

I tell my friend Paloma about the email this afternoon in a "can you believe this?!" way and, well, yes, she could.

"But do people actually pay it?" I wondered.

"Oh yeah," she shrugged, "especially when then whole 'well, I've got a girl coming tonight to sign the contract...' threats begin."

"Oh." I said. "Oh."

This is part of what I mean when I tell people that life is not always easy here.

One more thing.

2007-09-13T22:43:00.001-04:00

There is currently a scorpion on my livingroom wall.

Pavel assures me they eat cockroaches and won't sting me unless I'm asking for it.

I am not amused, nevertheless.

That is all.

A quiet glimpse to the right

2007-09-13T14:19:00.000-04:00

It's almost the Day of the Dead, down here south of the border. As soon as this Independence Day weekend's orgiastic glory of green, white and red has faded from store shelves, the city will be knee-deep in well-dressed skeletons, sugar skulls, and candy coffins. I've already begun to whine to Pavel about the life or death necessity of constructing our own little alter in the apartment, in my touristic fervour to honour this most unique tradition.

For many foreigners, the gaping eyes and grinning maws of the skeletal decorations are a little on the morbid side (albeit in a charming way). For those of us from the lands where death is spoken about behind trembling hands - "she's passed on" and "he's gone to a better place" - there's something shockingly and wonderfully unsanitized about the depiction of death here: the dead are dead, not prettily at peace. La Katrina, the symbol of the Day of Dead, can be seen coquettishly extending one bony leg from her evening dress with her hollow eye sockets emanating upper class joy.

But why go on about Day of the Dead now, if it's still a month and a half away? Well, because that same unblinking acceptance of death and decomposition that resonates through that particular holiday has caught me a little off-guard today and reminded me, once again, that we're not in Kansas anymore.

There is a newspaper here called La Prensa - literally, "the press" - with the tagline "we print what the others won't." This includes, it seems, pictures of dead people. Not dead people like we're used to up north either, where a single shoe will protrude coyly from under a sheet or behind a car; no, here, these people are Dead.

Dead as in five decapitated heads rolled like bowling balls onto a dancefloor.

Dead as in a woman with half her face gone, left on a block of ice just above her head.

Dead as in a young man with blood pooling with spectacular quantity in the gutter beside him.

In your face propriety and innocence Dead.

DEAD.

The first time I stumbled upon rotten.com (I was looking for rancid.com or something like that, and had been trolling synonyms), I looked at a picture of a high-speed Lamborghini accident and thought "wow, did I *ever* not need to see that." Now, strolling past the daily images of shootings and abductions and narco snuffings, I barely flinch.

Until today.

Today's image was of a university professor (so proclaimed the headline) who had been quite thoroughly cooked in a major housefire. It was, perhaps, the glistening viscera that got to me, tucked in as it was amidst all that char.

I mean, REALLY.

What is the point? Are we better off for knowing what the victim of a severe fire looks like? Is this a noble acceptance of death on the part of the Mexicans or merely voyeurism left unchallenged by social pressure?

One of my ex-roommates told me once that there is an expression here: "Death, she sits always on your right side." I find this unblinking acceptance of life's only guarantee (forget taxes in this country - half the people I know don't pay them...) nobly clear-headed and rational, and I think our habit up north of tiptoeing around such a natural event to be quite inane. Why not honour our dead relatives by cooking their favourite food instead of tucking them away into the ground and turning back to focus only on those left?

But does an acceptance of death mean a necessity to gape at human suffering? I am not better off for seeing that poor professor's fate, that's for sure. If anything, I'm vaguely nauseous.

Now, this is not to say that I think all Mexicans are giddy partakers of said newspapers, or that the morbidity of Mr. Crispy equates with the serene celebration of Day of the Dead. I'm not even sure La Prensa's fascination with the bloodiest of the bloody crime scenes is indicative of Mexican culture, as much as that Lady Death sitting to our right prevents any major uprising against the publishing of such images.

Or is it? I've written before on my impression of the unnecessary violence of Mexican-Spanish Catholicism: is a photograph of a narco-hit really so much more shocking or explicit than a life-size image of Jesus, tied to a stump and flayed to the bone? The latter is to inspire piety; perhaps the former has a similar cultural purpose? Remind us to kiss our loved ones goodnight and wear clean underwear and do good because you never quite know when it's going to be [spectacularly] over?

Is this all the echoes of an ancestry in which ripping the still-beating heart out of your sacrifice was a common occurrence? Perhaps we're wrong, up in the whispering north, equating death with loss, when it fact death, like birth, equates blood and pain?

So maybe I am saying that this casual depiction of the most horrific gore is a part of Mexican culture after all. (The folly of stream-of-consciousness blogging, to catch oneself in a contradiction.) Death here is loss - a family member to be fed and watered every November 2nd - and it is suffering and it is blood and it is not pretty and it is not serene and it is not to be ignored.

All that being said, I can't bloody wait for Day of the Dead.

I load sixteen tonnes

2007-09-06T15:00:00.001-04:00

Work is, as always, a bit of a trial.

Long since passed the days of wondering whether I should be staying later than my internal Canadian whistle indicated, circumvented by way of arriving earlier than everyone else in order to justify leaving earlier than everyone else, I nonetheless continue to have issues with this job.

Back when I was worrying about the hours worked:professionalism ratio, I commented to Pavel on how I couldn't believe the hours your average Mexican worker (or at least those I know) considers a normal day: Ana, for example, works from 8am to 7pm, and my own colleague Poncho regularly shows everyone up by arriving at 9am and staying well past 10pm. "Ah," mused Pavel, "yes, Mexican work long hours but they don't necessarily accomplish much."

The other Mexican labour-ism I'm starting to realize the truth of finally is that it pays to be the boss. No, you *think* you know that one already, but you don't. Not to this scale. Even conceding that taking on the personal risk justifies some degree of hedonism when or if you succeed, rarely have I seen such shameless exploitation of a labour force as in this city.

But I'm not going to fill up this blog with a litany of complaints against a boss that seems oblivious to her responsibility for the simmering mutinous ramblings of her underlings or against a labour culture that seems to encourage taking the bread out of a colleague's mouth to feed your own. I made the decision to stay here and in this job, and my prize at the end, hopefully, will be a positive reference and a notch for my resume that will prove cash-able in my next career stop. So no more ranting.

But I'm tired and my blog is suffering for it and I do apologize to the scattered few who check it semi-regularly.

My fondness for Mexico grows despite the solidification of cold, hard, 'how am I going to pay for groceries next week?' reality. I could see myself staying here for some time yet, you know?

Panic! In the metro

2007-07-30T11:44:00.000-04:00

I had my very first panic attack yesterday. It was scary and interesting at the same time, though I do feel for people who get them regularly as they are more than a little disruptive.

In my case, I suspect it was systems overload. I had had a tough morning and had ventured out into the overcrowded Mexico City metro system with my nervous system more than a little fragile. Sitting on the first train, I was fighting back tears, tilting my head up to prevent them from going anywhere. By the time I had exited that first train and begun the underground trek to change lines, I could feel myself start to lose control: my breathing accelerated, my heart rate must have doubled, my body started to shake. By the time we were on the second train, I was in full hyperventilation and my vision was fading in and out. I was terrified that I was going to pass out right there, in the middle of the cd barkers and metro users and gawking men.

(Side rant: Why gawk when you can tell someone is distressed? Help out or look away and pretend you haven’t noticed. It’s remarkably embarrassing to be in distress in a public place anyway – why make it worse? Jerks.)

Throughout this time, my mind was remarkably clear. “Pavel,” I gasped in between heaves, “I’m about to have a panic attack.” I was trying to force myself to breath more slowly, in through the nose/out through the mouth, and joking feebly about my inability to make a dent in the panic level. As my body twitched and writhed, I was making silent notes of curiosity about my core temperature, the frequency of blackout moments in relation to the severity of the hyperventilation, the relationship between heartbeat and trembling limbs.

It took a remarkably long time for me to recover my breathing, slumped in a reasonably empty stairwell, Pavel reading his magazine patiently on the step below me. My heartrate continued for much of the day, as did the shaky legs. The wavering consciousness, thankfully, faded with the breathing issues.

It was… wild.

I mean really really incredible. Utterly fascinating. A total loss of physical control, no mind over matter possible. The animal body, perhaps, except I’m not entirely sure how my biological self benefits from a panic attack: had a lion been about to eat me, I would have gazed bemusedly with out-of-focus eyes as he ran off with my lower half. Not a great survival technique, really.

This has nothing to do with Mexico, per se, although it did happen while IN Mexico and hence is here. I just felt like sharing.

I am, incidentally, feeling much better today.

July 12th

2007-07-12T12:05:00.000-04:00

"The cynic is the architect of his own abyss. To devour life, seeds and all - that takes courage."

- Some movie I never caught the name of (but if you know it, do tell me)

Happy Anniversary Mexico. Hard to believe it's been a year with you. Sometimes it feels like much more more, and sometimes - usually when it comes to my dawdling Spanish - it feels like much much less.

Tits & Ass

2007-07-03T14:27:00.000-04:00

Argentinian girls are hot.

I don't think so, mind. At least, I don't think they are any hotter than your average Latina (although Venezuela and Brazil do seem to produce a well above average number of well above average looking people), but there is a cultural perception in this country that Argentinian girls are somehow a more marketable hotness.

My job sent me to my first trade show last week, accompanied by my lovely co-worker, Jose Luis, who would serve as my Spanish when the going got tough (and tough the going did get indeed sometimes).

We quickly devised a system: I did very well with the slightly smarmy 40 to 60 year old men, who would touch my elbows and invite themselves back to Canada with me, and the handsome young Jose Luis could charm the young women. We both failed at the older women, and the younger men were unpredictable.

There were a lot of booths at this trade show - well into the hundreds, with great whirring machines demonstrating industrial labelling and food dehydrating and Coke bottle filling - so we started to pick our booths based on which had the creepy old men for me and the hot young girls for Jose Luis.

Which is about when I noticed that there were a LOT of hot young girls.

Wearing very little.

But a lot of make-up and glitter.

Who would never actually talk to you when you approached, but would hand you a brochure and signal someone older and less attractive from the back.

Are they...? Did they...? At a processing and packaging trade show?

No! Seriously?

Wow.

I mean, cars I can see. And alcohol. And even travel - bikinis and beaches are a logical combination.

But that machine seals tin cans! How are bikinis and tin cans related?

I couldn't wait to tell Pavel that evening but he was hardly surprised. "It's very Latino", he said, telling me about a recent education-based trade show he worked where the hired girls were out in full force and barely any clothing.

"Denis!", I wrote excitedly to my brilliant friend, "Can you believe it?" He could, in fact, and let me in on Canada's hidden shame: the girls were common in Canada as well until a few years back, before women took to the labour force in sufficient numbers to (a) void the purpose of these girls at the trade shows, and (b) kick up enough of a fuss to eliminate them altogether.

How did I not know this? And how does this surprise me? The objectification of women and commercialization of sex is not a new concept nor one limited to Latin America.

Yet here the commodification of a woman's body as something entirely separate from her person is... normal, common, daily. Not only do trade show companies hire women to dance in lycra tube tops as a means of promoting the latest personal security gadget, billboards feature sprawled models in bikinis with their heads and/or any other identifying feature cropped out of the picture altogether. Yogurt is sold pressed between disembodied breasts. Jewelry is touted draped on detached perky asses. Luchadores (the masked wrestlers) are led in by an ever-changing roster of pneumatic bathing suited babes without names, who line up and smile and bounce as the camera focus on their artificially enhanced chests.

It irks me, of course, and some would say that I'm maybe a little bit jealous of not being quite as taut as these girls (it's probably true), but the odd offensiveness of it does go one step further...

Very VERY rarely are these girls Mexican.

In the billboards, the television commercials, the television shows, the trade shows, the lucha girl line-ups: they're almost never Mexican. "A typical Mexican girl!" is Pavel's favourite derisive snigger while watching television.

They are, almost always, Argentinian.

Is it because Argentinians tend to be a little fairer? Is it because they are the "Parisians of Latin America", and celebrated and reviled at once accordingly? What is it that makes them the desired ethnicity? Because, seriously, they're really not any more attractive than Mexican women.

And woe to the Peruvian hottie or the Brasilian bombshell or the Canadian pin-up (ahem) who wants to break into Mexican modeling world. You might find some work, if you're pretty enough, but you're more likely to find yourself in a very dodgy situations instead.

And the Russian and Eastern European goddesses? Why, there's a strip club just up the street from my house with your name on it. Leave your passport at the door.

But those skinny little Argentinian gals, they're in high demand, and so they flood into Mexico, the land of golden opportunity for residents of a country who never hope to be able to afford a place of their own, and they don the tight t-shirts required to earn between two and five thousand pesos per day as hired tits and ass.

Yes, you read that right. And to put it in perspective, remember that I currently earn eight thousand per MONTH, working 55+ hours a week.

(On a remotely related sidenote, I received a mis-sent text message a month ago saying, "Allison, I invite you to my home in Puerto Vallarta. I can promise you $1000 US a day." I wrote back, "Not Allison." He wrote back, "Are you a masseuse?" I wrote back, "No, but for $1000 US a day, I should be...")

Perhaps I am jealous that I'm not as taut as they are. Feminist peevishness aside, how nice would it be to wiggle and bounce, suffer a bit of anachronistic ogling, and earn my month's rent in a day and a half?

Except, crap, I'm Canadian.

Damn it.

A declaration of affection in the face of opposition

2007-07-02T10:49:00.000-04:00

This post might seem redundant after the last one, written one long month ago, but the reality is that the last one was a giddy cover-up born of absolutely not an ounce of personal clarity despite its assurances of strength and decision-making.

I have been doing a lot of soul-searching, trying to figure out what it is exactly I'm doing here and with my life in general. In the bleak days of May, fleeing from a bad roommate situation and the end of a pseudo-relationship that maybe never should have happened, I got a little confused and lost. I thought about leaving because I afraid to stay; I thought about staying because I was afraid to leave.

It's made me think: so what exactly *am* I doing here?

Monday was the first anniversary of the national election, in which conservative candidate Felipe Calderon won the presidency over socialist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador by a less than one percent margin. To honour an allegedly fraudulent victory, Obrador's supporters took to the streets on Sunday by the hundreds of thousands to once again shake their signs and wave their flags and show support for a man of questionable ability to lead the government but who nonetheless puts on a truly excellent show.

As Pavel and I, hell-bent on museum hopping in the city centre, wound our way through the cheering chaos, a woman sang something huskily patriotic, her voice bellowing out with varying time lapses through speakers hung in the neighbouring streets. When she paused, the crowd roared their agreement.

I love this city. God, I love this city.

Being in the middle of that protest was like stepping into Peronist Argentina, or at least the version of Peronist Argentina made famous by Andrew Lloyd Webber. That hundreds of thousands of people would deem it worth their time to don their yellow shirts and throw their little "yop"s into the air - not one time, but time and time again, protesting something that won't change but is still worth fighting for anyway - is breathtaking, amazing, inspiring.

Yes, Mexico City is polluted, and I lament the mountains that I know are there, behind the blueish smog, and I marvel on clearer days at how beautiful this valley must have been when the Spanish first stumbled upon Tenochtitlan. And, yes, this city is dangerous, and I have become far too accustomed to the daily photos of bloody bodies splayed on the front page of the newspapers, to the point that I no longer flinch to see a decapitated head.

But there is beauty and life here that leaves me in blissful, wondrous awe. I love this city, and I love being a part of this city. I love walking home and seeing the castle in Chapultepec and thinking "I live here!". I love discovering a new gordita place with Pavel. I love waking up to the mournful lowing of the gas vendors.

And, okay, so I'm not altogether happy in my job for a variety of personal and First world expectations clashing with third world realities reasons, but it is at least a step up from teaching English (a noble profession if that's what you want to do with your life, don't get me wrong) and will serve as an excellent step on the road to the kind of job I will enjoy and find rewarding. If I keep my mind focused on what I need from this position - a positive reference, a notch on my resume, some new skills - then what small sacrifice is the monotony and the short term underpayment if it means I get to have this vibrant, wonderful, challenging city outside my door every morning?

My mentor, the lovely Lee, once remarked to me that I have a tendency to live in the future, planning for the time when life will begin at last. "Life is now, Erika," she told me.

So what *am* I doing here? I'm living here. It might be finite, my time here, but that in no way detracts from the immediacy and relevancy of the now.

What a cheesy, cheesy post. I do apologize.

Drive-by updating

2007-05-30T11:16:00.000-04:00

I'm two days away from flitting off back home for a week, but I didn't want to go a month without posting anything and particularly not given the cliffhanger of my last post.

So this won't be terribly intro or... outro... spective, just a quick update of what's up, what's new, what's going on.

First off, a welcome to the world is in order. Yesterday morning, at around 9am, the as of yet unnamed first son of my brother and sister-in-law came yowling into the world, thereby fulfilling my dad's reason for existence by making him a grandfather at last. Given that my sister-in-law was working until only a week or so ago, expect to see the tot in full climbing gear, peaking Mount Rundle within the next few days.

Okay, now me.

Decision 2007: Korea, Toronto or Mexico actually turned out to be fairly easy. Toronto was quickly nixed as, while I miss my friends (and the sushi) terribly, there is in fact very little reason for me to return at this point.

So I pursued Korea, sending out resumes and receiving a flood of responses (I'm either a wicked cool teacher or there is tremendous need for English teachers in that part of the world...). I made plans to travel Mexico for a few weeks before leaving. I found and interviewed for the perfect job - adults, big city, full time, good pay, prepaid flight, medical coverage, apartment, by the coast. I was all set.

Then the school said, "So, do you want the job?" and everything inside me spontaneously liquified.

How many of you have been partial to my "flip a coin" strategy of making life decisions? It's not the usual flip dealio, it's about paying attention to the visceral response when the answer comes up. Visceral responses very very rarely lie, I've found.

I realized I'm not ready to leave Mexico. Not yet.

And so I'm not.

Nor, by the way, am I leaving my job.

April/May was tough, as those of you who received my weepy phone calls and ranting emails can attest to. The sudden dissolution of my home for reasons that, months later, I still couldn't even begin to guess at, left me rather lost. Sadness turned to bitterness turned to hostility, and everything around me and inside me tarnished. I slipped into behaviour patterns I swore two years ago I would never revisit.

But maybe it's what I needed, with all apologies to all its victims. In order to pull myself out of the funk, I made an effort to do the following:

1. Go through a major attitude shift about my life.

2. End my extremely unhealthy, totally unfulfiling "relationship".

3. Find a home where I feel safe and welcome. (Which is also conveniently walking distance to work, and MY GOD is it ever wonderful to not have to take Mexico City public transit every day.)

4. Identify the career future I want, and pinpoint how the now clearly leads to it.

5. Have a wonderfully productive conversation with my current boss in which I not only manage to successfully argue my value to the company (and thus deserved raise to a liveable wage) but also to take on the responsibility and challenge that will make this job interesting and rewarding.

The depression has passed, I'm pleased to report, and those I have the tremendous fortune to be seeing next week in Toronto will be spared any knuckle-gnawing angst. I feel... well, I feel good.

I wondered, during the glummer days, whether I have what it takes to do this. Why make things so much harder?, I thought.

But, really, why makes things easy? Look at this amazing city... Is it not all worth it, deep down?

The Ballad of EI

2007-05-07T17:17:00.000-04:00

It was to be expected, I suppose.

One can't just flit off to a foreign country, regardless of how "educated" and "open-minded" you like to think you are, and not run into the occasional conflict of cultures.

Perhaps I was expecting it to be limited to differences in the definition of "edible" or some other charming, fascinating little piece of trivia to blog joyfully about. "It's true! In Canada, "nigger" is a TERRIBLE word!" and so on.

So here I am in this job, where I work helping Canadian companies sell industrial knives and modems in Mexico. It is... well, it's a job. It's not what I went to school for and nary a voice has issued from the depths of my soul to exclaim, "Mining?! WOW!!" but the boss is lovely and steady paycheques are great. And, besides, it's a Real Job, an adult job, a job with Future Opportunities Abounding.

But lately I have been fighting an encroaching wave of discontent, mainly inspired by promises made but never realized. Raises not awarded. Help with the costs of computer maintenance not manifested. Travel perks not booked. Et cetera.

The fact I don't enjoy my job much isn't helping.

And, dearhearts, I am not coping. Day by day, I can feel my little heart shrivel up a little more at the thought of another day in that awkward brown chair. Any loyalty I might have had for such ruthlessly logical concepts as career paths and doors opening has faded to a dull-grey "meh, what a boring, horrible job."

All of this, I have decided - the promises and my reaction to them - is the result of opposing cultures coming into contact with disastrous results.

Firstly, the promises? Very Mexican. VERY Mexican.

Mexicans are a proud, non-confrontational people who will tell you what you want to hear in order to make you happy. It is an entirely non-malicious impulse on their part - I wasn't promised a raise to make me work weekends - I'm sure, down deep, they really wish they could do all they promise to do. Still, when dealing with Canadian companies, we have to very carefully explain to them that a "yes" from a potential Mexican buyer does not mean "yes," nor does it mean "maybe" or "no." It simply means "I want to make you happy!"

So when G says to me, "We won the contract! Bonuses for everyone!", I have absolutely not doubt she is, at that moment, actually thinking "Bonuses for everyone!" But whether those promised bonuses are silenced by financial realities or simply forgotten about, you will never hear about them again.

Now, you would think that, knowing this, I would be in good stead to withstand the dance of hope and rejection, but oh no, no no, I am far too Canadian for that.

Allow me to digress for a moment...

I am asked all the time if there is a difference between Canadians and Americans, as, as far as the average Mexican can tell, it all boils down to weather. After spending several months all haughty and suitably "don't insult me!", I finally came up with the following:

Americans are defined by the concept of "The American Dream": the belief that the poor boat-weary immigrant from Latvia with $3 in his pocket can, with an idea and a lot of hard work, become king. They dream big and think big and talk big, but it's all based on the idea that you must be unique, devoted and willing to work your tail off. Anyone who isn't king is a failure.

Canadians, in contrast, don't aim nearly as high or work nearly as hard. We are defined by our laws and cultural mores, believing that, if we work our 9 to 5 and pay our taxes and drive within the speed limit, everything will work out. And when our 9 to 5 doesn't pay us enough to survive, we get a bit indignant. A bit - dare I say it? - entitled. We march to our loyal leaders with our palms out, pleading "I tried but it didn't work", and they, in turn, cut us a cheque.

So here I am, in a foreign culture, in a job that takes up 55+ hours a week of my time and pays me $800 a month, and the screaming albatrosses of debt are not being silenced. I can rationalize like mad, pointing to Mexican minimum wages ($5 a day) and poverty lines ($150 a month) and the cost of living here (20 cents for the Metro), but on some deep, unavoidable, inherent level I am wondering why I don't have enough to make my student loan payments. Isn't this a full time job? Isn't it skilled labour? Am I not going to work every day?

...Then WHY isn't it working?

...It SHOULD be working.

A student of mine told me that, when a Mexican isn't earning enough money, he or she will make sandwiches and sell them to co-workers for a little extra money.

Canadian friends and family - be honest with me: if your employer wasn't paying you enough to survive, would you:

a) quit and look for something better paying?
b) ask the boss for a raise based on the integral role you play in the effective operation of the company?
c) spend your lunch hours peddling gum on the street for 50 cents a package?

Part of this is evidence of just how dire the employment situation is in Mexico: you can't risk losing your job because you never know if you'll be able to find another.

I, however, don't have that problem; if I can't find another job, I'll go home.

But I also do think part of this is that Canadian entitlement rearing up in me because Real Job means Real Money, damn it, and I simply won't accept anything less.

(As an aside, I do believe I would work for peanuts if I loved my job and believed that I was being paid fairly according to their ability to pay me. In this case, however, neither is true.)

So I've advised my boss that I will be leaving in a month or so. I haven't yet decided where - whether to another job here, to Korea to teach and pay off my debts once and for all, or back home - but I do know that I will not be able to reconcile the Mexican idea of work and my own idea of work, and so it is time for me to bid adios to the laserdisks and air compressors once and for all.

I admire and weep for the Mexicans when it comes to work ethic. They do put us to shame, in such an unenviable way...

A rose by any other name...

2007-04-20T13:50:00.000-04:00

The whole Don Imus thing has me thinking.

Let’s forget the fact that I think “ho” is more offensive than “nappy” and that people should have gotten more upset that he joked these college women were low-level prostitutes than about the ethnically-specific quality of their hair. But squeaky wheel, squeaky wheel: Rev. Sharpton beat Gloria Steinem to the punch.

So Don Imus was led out to the slaughter for making a racially insensitive joke, the last (or most recent) of a recent spate of them. People are now screaming “freedom of speech!” when the real call should be “realities of capitalism!” Imus said something that crossed a social boundary and his career blood will wash our sins away.

Honestly, I don’t know what exactly I think about the whole Don Imus firing but it does bring to focus a rather jarring difference between life in Canada and life in Mexico: the entire concept of political correctness.

Canadians are an uptight bunch for the most part, that we can all agree on. We are so fixated on rights and freedoms, we have constructed a rather constrictive set of cultural mores as to what is allowed. I wasn’t surprised that our country pushed through laws for same-sex marriage: it was almost irrelevant whether Joe Canadian thought two men getting hitched was wonderful or nauseating, we will apathetically fight to the death for a system that in theory – if not always in practice – gives everyone the same rights. As the Canadian government shovels out the compensation money for two hundred years of various institutionalized offences against human rights (eg. Japanese internment, Ukrainian persecution, Aboriginal residential schools, forced sterilization, etc.), we have created a culture where we fumble and trip over ourselves to not say or do anything that might be considered disrespectful of someone else.

(All of this, might I add, gives Canadians the international reputation for being extremely kind and tolerant. While I like this reputation and its benefits whilst traveling, I’m not convinced it’s altogether deserved – but that’s a post for a different time.)

Mexicans, on the other hand, are not so worried. They are children born of conquest, as opposed to the conquerors themselves, and regularly curse each other playfully by insinuating the other is the product of a raped mother (“chingada madre!”). They don’t carry this oppressive white guilt that characterizes so much of Canadian/British lawmaking: they never abducted Africans or colonized Asians, they never imposed themselves on existing cultures. And while a very large percentage of them languish in extreme poverty and destitution, often exacerbated by skin colour, they also do not carry around the remotest bit of hope that their government will come through for them.

As a result, Mexicans do not come across as terribly worried about political correctness. Really, who would it benefit? In an almost completely homogenous culture where almost everyone is in survival mode, who would you offend?

As a Canadian, I am regularly startled by some of the words and images that get bandied about here.

An example: A friend of mine went to Africa last year to work. On the box of her stuff in our storage locker, I noticed on Wednesday evening, she had written, “Gone to be a nigger!” and “I’m a happy nigger now!” My friend is not black – “nigger” is her affectionate term for the black people she would undoubtedly encounter in her new job. She even went so far, in her jovial no-offence-intended excitement, to photograph herself in black face paint and call herself a “niggerbaby.”

If you’re shocked, you’re not Mexican. “Nigger” is not an uncommon word here, nor is any reference to African stereotypes that would have the hounds loosed a few miles up. There is a chocolate bar called “Negrito” – “little black” – with the picture of a beaming afro’d African child with bright red lips. Those I have spoken to on this subject are aware that some of the words they use casually would be considered extremely offensive north of the border, but they defend the use on this side with, “But here it doesn’t have that meaning, it’s not derogatory.”

And it really doesn’t have that meaning here, it’s true, but that’s not something that I can wrap my Canadian brain around with any degree of satisfaction. When my highly educated, impressively open-minded (she thinks nothing of my living with men, which is a cultural question mark here) student described her new Chinese boss as “opening his tiny eyes wide” at a comment she had made, I flinched. “Be careful with remarks like those when you’re dealing with non-Mexicans,” I cautioned. “But I didn’t mean… They have…” she said. “Nonetheless,” I replied.

I do make a point in my classes, which tend to be with executives who need the language in order to do business with the United States, Canada and the UK, to explain to them that what flies here might cause a political firestorm elsewhere, but otherwise I do try not to get up on my high horse about everything. Moving to a new culture requires constantly checking your own cultural biases and patterns so as to recognize your filters and not impose them on others.

But I’m sensitive to it, and it’s not a cultural quirk I’m showing any signs of acclimatizing to. The common use of the word “Paki” was one of my least favourite things about living in Britain, and much of my problem with hiphop music is the persistent and unapologetic use of words that would make Don Imus blush. And while I have been known to throw around the dreaded c-word occasionally as part of an effort to defuse its negative connotation, I’m still not convinced that words without meaning are less damaging than the same words with. Wouldn’t it be better if we all stopped thinking it was funny (Imus), acceptable (hiphop) or insignificant (Mexico) to use words based on truly vile concepts and histories?

But there I go being all Canadian again. I’m quite fortunate, at least, in that the vast majority of my social network here are either too well-traveled to use language like that flippantly.

But that little chocolate bar does continue to bother me.

Shake it up baby, now

2007-04-13T12:57:00.000-04:00

Is it wrong to like earthquakes?

On one level, I've always taken pleasure when Nature rears up to smack us around a little, remind us who's boss. This is not to say that I don't feel for the families affected by said natural disaster, only that I believe our species is a little too presumptuous for our own good and it does us some good to remember that our massive skyscrapers and endless highways would rapidly crumble into nothing were we not always shoring them up against the busy fingers of Nature. It's only unfortunate that the victims are almost always the very poor - Wall Street execs would better deserve the talking to.

We had an earthquake last night, at about 12:45. Pavel came bursting into my bedroom, saying "Wake up, guerita. Do you hear the sirens?"

Indeed I did, from the radio in the next room: woooaaaaaahhhmmm woooaaaaahhhmmm.

"I'm not wearing any pants," I mumbled, clambering out of bed and thinking "an earthquake?! really?!! hoorah!!"

The lights went out. I felt this sudden rush of excitement, expecting at any moment the rumbling, rattling spectacle of the black and white Japanese security camera footage-type earthquake. We fumbled through the dark and crammed ourselves - Pavel, Luis and myself - into the kitchen doorway. Luis, who is remarkably sensitive about such things, had his head against the doorframe and was whimpering slightly. The dog was jumping about madly.

"Do you feel it?" asked Pavel. "Yes!" Luis moaned. "No!" I whined, desperate to feel it, straining to feel it. I listened for walls popping - nothing. I tried to make out the curtains and hanging lamps but saw no movement. I felt a bit dizzy, but wasn't sure if that was the effects of the earth moving underneath my feet or having been woken up suddenly, trussed up in a wool blanket, and towed to the other side of the house. (We've since decided, collectively, it was the earthquake.)

And then it was over. We sat by candlelight for awhile before the lights came on, while ambulances wailed through the streets.

No, there were no injuries and, other than one precariously leaning building, no apparent major damage. The ambulances, as it turns out, were for the many many people who have panic and heart attacks every time the earth moves. Because as flippant as I am about earthquakes in Mexico City, the vast majority of people remember 1985 far too clearly to share my glee at possible doom.

On September 19, 1985, at 7:17 in the morning, Mexico City was rocked by an 8.1 earthquake (last night was 6.3) which devastated the city: buildings collapsed, killing anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 people, depending on your source, and causing property damage upwards of $5 billion US. My she-roommate, Isadora, at the tender age of about 11, was packed up and moved to the northern state of Chihuahua after all the houses surrounding her grandmother's house neatly dominoed into the centre, leaving just her grandmother's standing. One of my students described running down a hotel hallway dressed only in a towel, watching the floors buckle under her feet and the tiles pop off the walls. A surprising number of newborn babies were fished out of the pancaked downtown hospital by workers with flashlights - they're now known as Mexico's Miracle Babies.

Buildings can be built to withstand a variety of earthquake movement, explained an architect friend to me, but the 1985 shook the ground in three ways: (pardon my technical language here) front to back, side to side, and up and down. The double resonance coupled with a soft sediment ground base made the earth a giant spring, causing buildings of more than six floors to sway nearly a meter, sometimes knocking one building into the next. In three minutes, Mexico's downtown core and numerous other neighbourhoods were devastated.

Mexico City was declared a disaster zone. Telephone lines were cut and a communications tower burst into flame, leaving residents without means of communication for several days. There was a pervasive smell of gas and the government pled for people not to light matches. There was looting and desperate calls for blood donors.

Surviving this would be traumatizing, indeed, but the real fear comes from the fact that it absolutely will happen again.

Mexico City lies in a great basin formed by the surrounding volcanic mountains, only one of which (Popocatepetl) is still active. Back when the Aztecs were thirstily terrorizing their neighbouring tribes, the city was a small island in the middle of Lake Texcoco; post-conquest, however, the Spanish were quick to drain the lake to make room for the rapidly-expanding city. The result of this is that a large part of Mexico City now is built on unconsolidated lake-bed sediment. Walking through the Historical Centre, you will notice the number of buildings now standing at rather shocking angles as a result of their unsteady base.

Southern Mexico lies beside the tectonic rift between the North American Plate and the Cocos Plate. In the 20th century, more than 35 earthquakes were recorded with a magnitude greater than 7.0. The 1985 earthquake had its epicentre at a well-known gap at the border of the states of Guerrero and Michoacan, known as the Michoacan Gap; this gap was filled in during the three minute quake and its 7.5 magnitude aftershock.

Earthquakes are quite reliable natural disasters, being as they are the sudden release of pressure that builds up beneath the tectonic plates. Southern Mexico experienced devastating earthquakes in 1957, 1979, 1985, and, most recently, 1999, making gaps of 22 years, 6 years and 14 years. 1957 and 1985 were both extreme, with a gap of 28 years. Today it is 2007, making it 8 years since the last major earthquake and 22 since the last severe earthquake.

Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick...

Still, I like them. I've not experienced more than faint dizziness, and I come from the stable soil of the frozen north where a particularly bad winter storm or a tornado is the worst we can expect, so I'm a bit ignorant of their potential for destruction and fear. So is it wrong to want, just once, to experience the rattling and creaking drama of it all? I don't want any loss of life or injury, and I'd really prefer it if the hotels and hospitals remain intact, but...

Or is that just twisted? Really, you can be honest with me.

Hablando sin miedo

2007-04-12T17:26:00.000-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a little bragging to do if you'll indulge me for a minute.

Last night, I went to see a movie entitled Cañitas with Pavel. Like The Amityville Horror, the title refers to the location (in this case the street, in Mexico City district of Las Lomas) of an allegedly true story involving the Devil moving in and failing to pay sufficient rent. The similarities don't end there, actually: the movie is based on a book by Carlos Trejo, who claims to have lived through the events therein.

And, like Amityville, Cañitas is not a good movie. Pavel's eventual verdict was that it was very unfortunately "mediocre", meaning that it's not good enough to be terrifying yet not bad enough to be charming and hilarious. It's poorly directed, poorly written, poorly filmed, and, while reasonably well acted on most accounts, it is altogether too convinced of its own brilliance. I did, admittedly, jump once at a scene involving shattering glass and tender facial areas.

(The director, Julio Cesar Estrada, recently appeared on the cover of a cinema-related magazine along with acclaimed Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu, quite obviously photoshopped into an existing photo of the award-winning threesome. I'm not entirely sure who did the photoshopping, but it was quite clear that Estrada did not necessarily belong in such esteemed company.)

But! Is any of that the point? Because while Pavel was commenting to our roommate Luis, himself a filmmaker, about the shoddy dialogue and poor cinematography, all I could say about the movie was: "I UNDERSTOOD IT!!"

Movies are not generally a problem for me here, as the majority of mass market movies spring from the moist womb of the Hollywood machine and Mexicans, bless them, appear to be considerably more accepting of subtitles than our own dub-happy selves. I've generally clung to my faulty Spanish as a reason not to attend too many foreign language films, which are impressively prevalent here also (see above re. acceptance of subtitling) although I did prove reasonably competent reading ability in Mel Gibson's dialogue-light Apocalypto. My listening skills, however, as used in my day to day existence, remain in doubt.

And so, when Pavel suggested we see Cañitas, my stomach dropped. "Hell," I thought, "Go for it. It's a horror movie, so how important is the dialogue anyway?" However, walking to the theatre, I was preoccupied by fears of being completely lost (and therefore bored) or of getting tired sometime into it and tuning out. As we bought hot dogs and popcorn (dinner of champions!), I felt a pervasive need (thankfully resisted) to assure the ticket-taker that I wasn't some useless gringa. As the previews rolled, I wondered what the hell I was doing at a Spanish language movie.

But I did it, I did it, I did! And not any flimsy "well, I think I know what's going on" but actually understanding the dialogue itself - probably 85%. It would have been higher even, my comprehension ratio, had the movie's creators not fallen into the tragically hackneyed pit of voice scrambling for the evil characters; screw with the language at all - children, special effects, mumbling - and I am LOST.

And while Cañitas is hardly Proust, the boost I felt realizing that I could maybe do this whole Spanish-thing will make me a lifelong fan of that terrible, odious film.

Spanish scares me. I love its logic (particularly in comparison with the willy nilly free-for-all that is English) and its purring r's, and how a mildly heated discussion over a traffic ticket becomes a linguistic swordfight between saucy Latin lovers in black masks and pirate shirts while smouldering woman with heaving bosoms throw rose blooms into the air. I love the variations between Mexican Spanish and Argentinian Spanish and Spain Spanish. I love how it feels to try to pronounce the double-r's and double-l's, and how Pavel claps his hands and calls me "niñita" (little girl) when I do.

Around Pavel, in fact, Spanish is quite simply wonderful; around everyone else, however, it is quite simply terrifying. I have grown used to Pavel's accent and his phrases, and I understand much of what he says even when he launches into rapidfire Spanish instead of his S-L-O-W and C-A-R-E-F-U-L Spanish. The rest of the city, however, often sounds to me like an fleet of pirate shirt-clad machine guns: rrrrr-ttt-rrrrr-ttt-rrrrr-tttt! And there is absolutely nothing I have experienced more alienating than not being able to communicate - worsened, perhaps, by my own obsession with language.

I can communicate now in Spanish, and I managed to open a bank account with internet access and an extra debit card for my parents (for my debt) without help, but it remains the Prom Queen I haven't the courage to just ask to dance already. In moments of clarity and when I am dealing with strangers who will never see me again, I am reasonably confident; Mexicans respond to even the poorest effort with jovial affection and, often, unassuming tutoring. Generally, after saying something in English, I go over it in my head and realize, no, I actually *could* have said that in Spanish after all. Yet my attempts to actually speak Spanish are slow and awkward and, as a result, despite living in Mexico, more than 90% of my day is in English. Curse my friends and their flawless bi- (sometimes tri- and quadri-) lingualism.

When I moved here, my goal was to be conversational in three months. I envisioned throwing myself into the proverbial deep end with brazen assuredness polish it right up. What I've realized since is that brazen assuredness is not among my stronger characteristics, and the resulting delay in the development of my Spanish skills weighs heavily on my conscience.

So you can only begin to imagine the deep joy I felt when, while watching that wonderful banal attempt to recycle horror movie cliches, I realized that, despite my fear and passivity, it's creeping in there. That beautiful, elusive language is getting through.

As I said to Pavel on the street outside the theatre: "I can do this! I can DO this!" He squeezed my elbow.

My next goal: a movie actually worth my 32 pesos.

Friday, Bloody Friday

2007-04-05T17:33:00.000-04:00

The problem with living in a foreign country, as opposed to merely touring it, is that most of your friends are local. That may sound like a good thing, and it is, usually, except on those occasions when you want to be a shameless tourist and can’t for the life of you find anyone who cares enough to come with you.

This weekend is Easter, which up in Canada means a Friday off work. Some people go to church and some people plant chocolate eggs for the kiddies, but on a national level it is just a much-needed holiday after many months of winter.

Down here, however, 89 percent of people define themselves as Catholic, so Easter is a Big Deal. We are currently in Semana Santa, or Saint Week. Most people get the entire week off work; some get next week off as well. Me, I got two days but I’m not complaining. Okay, perhaps I am a little.

Tomorrow morning, on Good Friday, in the legendarily dodgy neighbourhood of Iztapalapa, a man who has spent the entire past year in training will be publicly whipped, paraded through town and nailed to a cross in front of one million weeping onlookers and the wailing woman playing his virginal mother.

(The hill they do the crucifixion on, incidentally, was discovered in 2005 to be in fact a sod-covered 1500 year old pyramid on the scale of, and probably built by the same people as, Teotihuacan, the big archaeological wonder northeast of the city. They have decided they are not going to excavate, however, as the Passion Play has been a tradition for 130 years and, well… I guess religion trumps science in this one.)

On Saturday, all the Virgin Mary statues around the city will be dressed in black robes while believers parade silently through the streets in mourning.

I am not a believer in the resurrection of Jesus, I admit, although I do think the symbolism is quite beautiful. I also am a believer in the virtue faith (not organized religion...), and the opportunity to see one million people connecting with their belief systems on such a fundamental level is both intellectually and emotionally fascinating for me.

And, yes, perhaps there is a little bit of wanting to see someone actually be crucified (albeit not to the point of suffocation and death,). When Luis, my roommate, first told me back in the fall that this would happen, I was gobsmacked. “Actually crucified?!?” I yelped in disbelief. “With nails through the wrists and everything?” Dragging a cross through the streets is common even in passive Canada, and I’ve heard of people in other countries strap themselves to crosses in symbolic reverence, but this man – this volunteer, carefully selected to match specific height and weight restrictions as well as psychological stability – is going to be flogged 39 times and then nailed to a cross for an hour or two. This is, quite simply, an unfathomable level of dedication for me.

It’s in keeping with the Mexican style of worship, I suppose, which they inherited both from their indigenous ancestors and their Spanish conquerors. The Aztecs (and not the Maya, contrary to what Mr. Gibson recently implied) were enthusiastic partakers of sacrifice, believing that their gods had sacrificed themselves in order to bring mankind into existence and sustain us. That corn you’re eating? That bit of chicken? That’s all the severed fingers, blood and heads of the deities. Oh yeah baby.

So the Aztecs believed they owed the gods a little something for their generous effort, and would with equal generosity smash, bury, burn, throw into lakes or slaughter almost everything, from animals to jewels to household objects. Prior to matches of pelota (a ballgame so fascinating and complicated that I shall leave it up to you to research it), priests would cut their tongues in order to offer their own blood; some scholars believe that some tribes would go on to sacrifice the losing team.

But it’s the Aztec tradition of human sacrifice that is the most globally renowned. If you stop for a moment to realize that almost every society on this planet has at some time snuffed one of their own for the pleasure of their gods, one must wonder why it is that the Aztecs became the unequivocal poster children for the artform.
Personally, I think it was the elaborate viciousness of the ritual: victims were taken up to the top of the pyramid (and consider that most people nowadays have to stop and rest at least once when hiking the ruins, and most of them are not carrying screaming prisoners of war), laid backwards on a stone slab the size of a breadbox, and their beating heart would be ripped out through an incision in the abdomen. The victim, still kicking, would then be rolled unceremoniously down the temple stairs, where the head would go on a stake and the rest fed to captive animals.

Willing volunteers believed they would join the Sun God on his daily chariot ride, often offering themselves after a year of living like a God on Earth, complete with the services of four young women. The less willing ones just made the gods happy, preventing plagues of fire, drought, famine, and Tezcatlipoca’s mood swings.

Nor was it just the Aztecs, either, although for reasons of not attempting to explain the entirety of Mexican history in one blog post, I shall refrain from getting into here. However, just to back up the argument: although no one knows who built the pyramids at Teotihuacan (the name itself means “Place Where the Gods Are Born” in Nahuatl, as the site had already been abandoned by the time the Aztecs got there), they have found the remains of hundreds of sacrificed children and adults buried at the corners.

One of the reasons the Spanish so easily and efficiently conquered the mighty Aztec empire was due to the fact that, so despised were the Aztecs for their bloodthirsty ways, the surrounding tribes were all too happy to throw in with the Spanish to get rid of the bastards once and for all. And so, roughly 500 years ago, in roll the Spanish with their Inquisition bloodlust and that particularly Spanish brand of Catholicism in which the primary focus is not on the resurrection but on the sacrifice.

Really, it’s not surprising that this country converted: the two histories mesh together rather well, no?

I honestly don’t know what I think about all of it on a deeper level. There are two chapels in the Catedral Metropolitana: the main one, which is misty and dim and full of weeping crucifixion images, and the secondary one, which is helmed by a brightly coloured image of paradise. I prefer the latter on a spiritual level, regardless of my morbid fascination for the former. I know I don’t really understand how one would prefer to derive inspiration from images of extreme suffering rather than the many teachings of love, forgiveness and hope inherent in the religion. My Catholic friend Lily tried to explain it to me once – “Guilt,” she said, “Look what He went through for you. Be a better person damn it.” – but… well… it’s very… graphic… It escapes me, really.

Then again, as a passive-aggressive agnostic Canadian, I wouldn’t know ideological fervour if it offered to buy me dinner and a movie.

And, so, with this combination of history and that fiery Latin seizing of life, is it all that surprising then that there would be at least one Mexican per year willing to be flogged and crucified in the name of his faith?

And, as a Canadian tourist, is it at all that surprising that I am *desperate* to see this in person?

But right around to my original complaint. With a notable lack of deep believing Catholic friends, I find myself alone in my interest in the events of this weekend. I need a little backup reserve of tourist friends; perhaps I should spend the night in the hostel or something just to meet gawk-minded people for tomorrow.

I can’t get over how fascinating this country and culture is. It really is incredible.

Just another day in paradise

2007-03-26T17:12:00.000-04:00

I want to write about pity but I want to do it in such a way that I don’t come across as trite or demeaning. I’m not sure that’s possible. Pity is inherently demeaning to the person being pitied, yet it’s a sensation I find myself struggling with on an almost daily basis.

It’s not just Mexico – I’ve always been a sucker for the underdog. I have trouble going into sparsely populated little stores because I feel somehow obligated to buy something; when finances decree that’s impossible, I leave with a surprisingly large degree of shame and guilt. It’s an extreme reaction, I admit, and probably worth some looking into on a psychoanalytical level.

I am not, however, generally susceptible to beggars. I have that Canadian sense of righteousness, I suppose, in which I assume that things will always work out as long as you follow the rules and do what’s expected of you. Those scrambling sorts on Queen Street, therefore, must be rebels, subversives, people unwilling to play the game, which is all fine and good and even moderately respectable but it doesn’t mean I must therefore sacrifice a penny of my hard-earned, hard-conformed money in order to support them. As low as I must hang my head to admit it, I do generally respond to most people begging for money with a silent snarling, “Go get a job.”

(Buskers and newspaper sellers, by the way, are not included in this list. Those, I feel, are just another definition of “job” – they are not asking for my money but earning it, and I will give it over freely if their music has made me smile.)

Now, one would think that a country with the personal financial crises as this one would lead to a great number of beggars on the street, but the reality is quite the opposite. Yes, there are beggars, but these are…

This is not Toronto.

My dear friend Ana went to Toronto for the first time this past Christmas and was not terribly impressed. Too many homeless people, she said.

People don’t beg in Mexico City unless they are absolutely out of other options. Young people sell pirated cd compilations for $1, children sell packets of gum for a nickel. The very destitute will crawl along the subway floor, rubbing at shoes with a dirty cloth without once making eye contact with you. The streets are lined with men and women selling flowers, peanuts, shelving units, cigarettes, baked goods, mechanical birds that sing, Mexican flags, inflatable dolls, helium balloons, clothing, bubble wands, organ music, cellphone air time, football paraphernalia…

So who remains? Those unable to wind their way between the cars with tamarind lollipops because of visibly gangrenous limbs. Tiny grandmothers who couldn’t find a job in a society that puts legal age limits on employability. Mothers, often indigenous, dangling with babies and small children who play quietly on the side of the road.

Now me, I talk about money constantly. I don’t earn a lot here – I did approach my boss after receiving my first paycheque and managed to talk her into paying me more, but it’s still what I earned in a week up in Canada. After putting 95% of my paycheques in the bank so my parents up in Canada can do me the immensely kind favour of transferring it to my Canadian account, I have very little left. I am learning to appreciate the value of a dollar/peso.

But it’s a choice, this poverty, and not even true poverty at that. I make the decision to not leave enough money in my pocket to go to a movie, but I’m still buying Coca Light (a much better tasting version of Diet Coke) and watermelon with chile on a regular basis. If I wanted to, I could put 25% or 10% of my money in the bank and live large on what I’m making. As is, I’m planning on spending a frugal Easter weekend in the nearby city of Cholula because, gosh, I sure could use a break.

And so when tiny shrouded grandmother wanders up to the window, lifting her hand high in a way that is part open to receive and part plaintive prayer, my usual underdog shame and guilt combine with a pervasive sense of pity to form one profoundly complicated emotion. I cannot simply dismiss her, write her off as yet another hand trying to get undeservedly in my pocket, yet I also cannot save her.

And so I ache a little inside and I try not to make eye contact with her because the humanity is overwhelming and I try not to feel terrible that TD Canada Trust and the National Student Loans Centre of Canada are apparently more deserving than an elderly woman forced onto the street by circumstances unknown.

And then I move on.

Light turns green, bus rolls past, the woman is left beside the road. I’ll see her tomorrow, no doubt. She’s always there.

The man outside my apartment will hopefully sell a few handmade wooden breakfast-in-bed tables today. I hope he does, as much for me as for him.

I can’t conceive of the definitions of my responsibilities to the greater world yet, although I’m quite certain they are greater than those I’ve been living to date.

Don't tell mama...

2007-03-05T11:59:00.000-05:00

A warning: Please do not read this post if you are prone to worrying about me living here. Seriously. This topic has been on my mind and is a big part of living in this city, but it's also quite possibly proof of my mother's deepest fears. No one ever said that Mexico City was safe and placid, now, did they?

During my first ever visit New York City, back in 1999, there was a horrific crime committed on the streets of the Upper East Side: in the middle of the afternoon, a homeless man, for reasons unknown, approached a young woman from behind and struck her hard across the bank of the head with a brick. The woman survived but required significant hospital care.

I was mildly obsessed with this incident, poking at the bruise for weeks from the shock and fascination. Completely random! Middle of the day! Upper East Side!

Growing up as I did in Edmonton, cuddly city of innocence tucked into the heart of prairie Alberta, we could rely on one fact: if we stayed away from drugs and bad people and just generally kept our noses clean, it was almost certain we'd be just fine. Prostitutes and unsupervised children were at risk, but the rest of us could go about our lives without fear for our safety at the hands of others.

But if it ever was that idyllic, the times are changing. On December 26th, 2005, on the corner of Toronto's main drag - Yonge & Bloor - a 15 year old girl out with friends seeking some post-Christmas bargains was caught in gang-related crossfire and died right there on the sidewalk.

Yet I would argue that the perception of personal safety persists in Canada. Despite periodic murders that shock and horrify the nation, we (and by "we" I am making a not-insignificant exclusion of young black males in urban centres) generally remain true to the belief that murders happen to the drug-inflicted, the "at-risk" and, every now and then, the deeply unfortunate. Even the fables of New York City seem a small and almost insignificant detail in a larger tapestry: I have several female friends who live and work on these streets and - touch wood - have never been attacked by brick-wielding maniacs or stabbed randomly by the guy next to them while sitting calmly on the subway.

But we are not in Edmonton or Toronto or even New York, are we? I'm just starting to realize that.

Last week, my coworker left suddenly in the middle of the day. I, plugged into my music, didn't actually notice until much later, when my boss, giggling, told me that my coworker had left after receiving the news that a close friend of hers had just been murdered in an open air market.

"You're giggling!" I said to her, amazed.

"Ah, I know. It's awful." She said, meaning both the murder and her reaction to it.

The giggling was not the result of the murder, nor was it the result of what my coworker was at that moment going through, but rather it was due to the fact that this is not actually big news.

When Jane Creba was shot in Toronto, her face was on the cover of every single newspaper across the country for at least a week. Stop anyone on the streets of Toronto and I guarantee that 80% of them could tell you her name and/or pick her face out from a selection of photos. That she was young and innocent, that the murder happened in the middle of the day and in such a public place - this was unspeakable horror to most Canadians. Toronto Police stated sorrowfully that, as of December 26th and the death of Jane Creba, "Toronto has lost its innocence."

I looked the next days for news of the murder of a young girl in a market here and found nothing. There were some photos of another young girl who had been shot multiple times and left to die in a public place (there are at least three major newspapers here that on a daily basis prominently feature corpse photos on their front pages) but this had been a narcotrafficking hit, not random. The murder of my coworker's friend was unremarkable and overlooked entirely.

Since then, I have asked everyone I know well the following intensely personal question: "Have any of your close friends or family members been murdered?" I asked them to exclude friends of friends of friends (even I know someone then) and people who quote/unquote "deserved it" (eg. narcotraffickers, who have a very short shelflife in this country as the three major cartels regularly bump each other in grand theatrical design as part of their quest for national domination).

The answer, with only one exception so far, has been "Yes."

Just how dangerous is Mexico City?

In 2005, Canada had a national murder rate of 2.0 per 100,000 people, working out to about 640 people murdered annually across the country. Edmonton actually has one of the highest murder rates, with 44 in 2005. Toronto, oh great Canadian behemoth of crime and peversity, is actually per capita one of the safest major city in Canada with between 80 and 90s murders per year among its 4+ million inhabitants. Of these, only one or two per year are random, the rest being gang-related or with the victim knowing their attacker.

(As a sidenote, even though Canada's murder rate is significantly lower than the United States, did you know our rate for sexual assaults is more than double?: 0.733089 per 1,000 people compared to the United States 0.301318 per 1,000 people, according to The Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems. Bloody hell.)

The crime rate in Mexico City appears to have leveled off in recent years, after seeing a dramatic spike after the devaluation of the peso in 1994 threw the majority of the country into sudden and desperate poverty. In 2002, there were 13.04 murders per 100,000 nationally, with the majority relating to drug trafficking. Mexico City sees between 2.1 and 2.5 murders per day, which sounds pretty bad but consider this: if Mexico City had the murder rate of the American bad seed, Houston, Texas, they would see more than 3,200 murders per year.

(I should be citing all these references, shouldn't I? I'm just Googling "murder statistics 2006" and the city names if anyone wants to chase up on any of them.)

So is it bad here? Yes. It is. This is not a safe city, as can be evidenced by the long list of legitimate warnings given to tourists: don't trust the police, don't hail taxis on the streets, don't carry money. This is also a city of 20 million people, though, with a national poverty line of $150 a month and 65% of people living under it, so it's all a bit to be expected, no?

But, as my stepmother once mused when I was railing to move to New York, "It's the random violence that bothers me."

Am I worried now? I am, admittedly, a little preoccupied and am seeing this city and this country perhaps a little clearer than I did when I swallowed the potential for all rational fear and moved here, but I'm not particularly worried. I live a tame life, even compared to the average person: I don't drink and shun bars and nightclubs; I don't even know anyone who does drugs; I'm usually in bed by 10:30 or, on wild nights, watching videos in the living room with friends; and I have made a point of learning which neighbourhoods it is best to stay away from as a redheaded foreigner. Plus I remain somewhat buffered by my Canadian naiveté - this steadfast confidence in my right to live a full, quiet, obedient life until the day that a traffic accident or cellular failure takes me down - and 30 years of cultural conditioning are hard to break.

But suddenly these quaint urban ghost stories of freak attacks - stories told to give you a little thrill of horror and a flood of relief for your own blessings - don't seem quite so quaint.

Midnight larfs

2007-02-28T18:06:00.000-05:00

Speaking of feeling vulnerable and out of your element, Pavel plunked down beside me last night and announced that someone had left a death threat on our answering machine.

"You will be murdered," the message said in Spanish. "You do not know by whom. Be careful, be careful, be careful." And then they hung up.

I thought Pavel was joking. Pavel has been known to roll his eyes back into his head and speak in zombie voices just to creep me out. Pavel was not, this time, joking.

I was not amused, giving in to a few panicked tears. If this was a joke, it was a sick one. How did they get our phone number? Do they know us? Is there any chance this is real?

I was scared. Pavel shushed me.

This is the Mexico City equivalent of "Hey, is your refrigerator running? Better go catch it then!", apparently.

A message like this would be a crime in Canada, even when stated under the guise of a joke.

I'm still not terribly impressed. Nice bloody joke.

Not in Kansas anymore.

2007-02-27T15:32:00.000-05:00

I fell oddly and severely ill on Friday, en route to class. I thought at first it was just motion sickness - something I am more than a little prone to, and likely given that my travel involves cramming myself into the hot, stuffy sardinian confines of the Mexico City MetroBus. However, by the time I was sitting on the stairs outside the office waiting for my students to arrive, it had become quite clear that this was no ordinary queasiness: I was faint and severely dizzy, swallowing back assumedly-related waves of nausea, and sweating so badly that my clothes were soaked through.

No, not pregnant. I know you're thinking it. I'm not, I promise.

By the time I had canceled class and staggered to the curb, I had determined two things: one, that I needed to lie down very very badly and very very soon; and two, that I had absolutely no idea how to make this happen.

It was one of the single most terrifying experiences of my life. I am not particularly afraid of this city despite its foreignness but, struggling against the fear that something bad might or might not have been taking place in my central nervous system, the city was suddenly a snapping, snarling black forest in which I had completely and utterly lost my path. I was perfectly aware of the MetroBus nearby and the microbuses just up the street and the hundred pesos in my wallet that would have sufficed for a taxi, but the dizzy nausea not only affected my ability to see and walk, it directly impeded with my ability to think. I could not for the life of me figure out how to get home. I tried to make a decision but the options seemed unfriendly and insurmountable.

And so, helpless, scared and emotionally six, I sat down against the wall of a store, pulled my knees up to my chin, and started to cry. I don't know how long I was there - several minutes at least. When a strange older man finally stopped and asked me if I was okay, I looked up at him blindly and said, "No."

And this strange older man did what any kindly soul would do. He asked me what was wrong, what I needed, offered to get me some water. He provided options - a doctor up the street, a coffee shop around the corner, hailing me a taxi - before realizing that I was incapable of making decisions and thus made them for me. He walked me to the corner, waved down a taxi, and told the driver where to take me. He even offered me money for the cab, which thankfully I was coherent enough to refuse (few people in this city can really afford to give $100 away, despite the number of people who will leap to action if they deem you in need). He gave me his office number on a slip of newspaper in case I needed anything.

I slept for the next 24 hours almost solidly, save one vaguely panicked phone call to my mother for assurance that I was not, in fact, dying.

If big cities are unfriendly, then one would suppose this monumental megalopolis would be a seething pit of inhumanity but of course that's not true. What struck me more was how blindingly foreign everything seemed the moment I was no longer capable of blazing forward with blind and enthusiastic abandon. I wonder: would the same fear have existed had this happened to me in Edmonton, or in Toronto? Was the problem my dizziness, the language and cultural differences, or something even more deeply ingrained?

I do believe one of the reasons that I am so intensely fulfilled when I am living in a foreign country is that I have deep inside me a profound sense of not belonging anywhere. I suffer from what Douglas Coupland calls "cultural aping" - the need to be taken as local regardless of where I am; I don't so much want to be a citizen of the world as much as I want to be a citizen of every single city in the world.

Mexico is a relief from this because there is simply no way I am ever going to be taken as local, even where I to live out the next fifty years on these streets. Wandering through a street market on Sunday, my girlfriends laughed delightedly at how difficult it would be to lose me with red hair gleaming several inches higher than all those dark brown coifs. But old happens do die hard so, when people ask me where I'm from, my answer is always, "Canada but I live here now." It's low-pressure belonging, though: I can belong and not belong at once, harmonically.

But the truth is I don't belong here, not in any deep emotional sense at least. I am so happy to be here and to be living this adventure but I do feel the strain of being so completely out of my element whenever something happens - a heartbreak, an illness, a bout of loneliness - that renders me emotionally vulnerable. Then and only then do I feel homesick, not for Canada per se but for a place where everything is just a little bit more familiar.

It, and the dizziness, passes after 24 hours' sleep and a good long hot shower, though.

Becoming local

2007-02-04T13:26:00.000-05:00

I am becoming local.

Not a Mexican, per se, because that involves an ethnic and cultural identity that I will never manage, regardless of how long I stay here, but a local.

A local in that I am no longer feeling like an onlooker here. I am now more or less a part of the tapestry.

Which may or may not be a good thing.

I realized this yesterday while walking to the Insurgentes MetroBus station. I was on my way to class and, hungry, had stopped to pick up a small plastic container of cucumber with limon and chile, which I was now carrying in one hand. Due to a protest on Reforma (yet again – any sympathy I might have felt for losing presidential candidate Lopez Obrador is gone entirely on the basis of the number of times his ridiculous empty protests have upset my day to day life), I had had to take a route I didn’t know to catch the MetroBus – a route that rounded a corner and brought me face to face with Mexico City-brand desperation.

First was the smell – the unmistakeable sweet and sour funk of clothes and body not washed – and then the person asleep/passed out on the ground whom everyone was merely stepping over. It was a few steps further before the others loomed up from either side of the path.

One young man, without even looking up once, fixated on my cucumber. He made a plaintive gesture, not a word. He stared at it.

It is unsettling to have someone beg for whatever it is you’re eating or drinking, but it is unfortunately not that unusual. In the past, overcome with privileged guilt, I have given in and handed my half-consumed water or half-eaten torta over to whichever large-eyed child had broken my resolve. I don’t feel particularly great about this kind of half-assed charity, and, while I am undoubtedly considerably better off than these people, I am in no financial position to be giving away food to everyone that asks. Still, it’s hard not to feel somewhat obligated to do something when asked directly; I might be struggling financially, but I at least am wearing shoes.

So when this young man with his knotted hair and torn clothes and gnarled feet fixated on my cucumber, my ordinary reaction would have been either to give it to him or at least to feel terribly guilty about not giving it to him. Instead, I simply said, “No.”

He made the hand gesture again. I said, “No.”

He made the hand gesture again. I said, “No.”

He made the hand gesture again. I said, “No!”

And by now, rather than being riddled with guilt, I was getting angry that he would not let me be. So the next time he made the hand gesture, still not having lifted his eyes once, I snarled, “It’s my dinner. No.” and stormed past him.

When Pavel and I were in Palenque in December, munching on peanut butter sandwiches bought with the few pesos we had left after the robbery, a little girl made the same hand gesture and gave us the same fixed, desperate, hungry look. Pavel told her no and turned a little to face me while I bled a little inside. Before her, it had been an emaciated little tan dog with howling eyes and its tail between its legs.

But yesterday, I felt nothing but possessiveness, my own survival in this often difficult city.

I am becoming local.

Money as a Foreign Language (MFL)

2007-02-03T15:33:00.001-05:00

When I made the decision to move to Mexico, it was with the realization that my career potential would be seriously limited, both by the language barrier and by the fact that Mexican immigration will only permit you to work in whichever specific field your degree or certificate says you know (ie. if you want to be a telemarketer here, you need a business marketing degree… seriously…). This lack of career potential didn’t concern me a great deal at the time, as it was the very fact that I have not a clue what to do with my post-theatre life that inspired me to make this move: if you need some time to think, why not at least think in an interesting country?

But rent is a reality no matter where you go, so, not entirely sure what a Masters degree in Drama would allow me to do, I invested the $1000 in a ridiculously easy TEFL course and applied to work here as an English teacher. This has been my life for the past seven months.

Teaching English is not rocket science, particularly when you’re as fortunate as I have been and end up with almost exclusively senior executives as students: intelligent, determined, and with jobs that depend on English competency. It’s also fun and rewarding, and gives you valuable insight into the daily lives of at least a sector of the Mexican population.

But there is a downside. Freelance teaching is uncertain: classes cancel while you’re waiting in the lobby for them to start, and cancellations often mean not getting paid. Students can cancel class altogether with little or no warning, leaving you with a chasmic gap in both your schedule and your pocketbook. And the travel from one location to the next, while apparently very good for the waistline, is exhausting and expensive. My Best Case Financial Scenario was a mighty reasonable salary, yet the reality was seven months of panicking about whether I could afford groceries this month or not.

But my own rising dissatisfaction in a life teaching English went deeper than that: for me and my own definitions of my future, teaching English as a Foreign Language is not a Real Job. And, damn it, I needed a Real Job so I could get some Real Money and get on with my Real Life already. I was sliding into a bit of a funk in December, pre-adventure in Yucatan, based almost entirely on this elephant-sized gap in my life.

In January, a Real Job almost literally dropped out the sky into my eager lap. My brother’s wife’s father (I’ll give a minute to work through that…) had visited Mexico City in November for an International Trade Mission sponsored by the Government of Ontario. The in-market representative for the mission was a lovely woman, G, who ran her own international trade marketing firm and who impressed the highly particular Mr. Brother’s Wife’s Father a great deal with her professionalism and skill. So, when she mentioned to him that she was looking for a new marketing specialist, he flipped her my number.

I got the job within two days, after a frantic call to my father for business advice on what to include in a Statement of Short, Middle and Long Term Goals and a laborious two hour interview entirely in Spanish. I started mid-January.

So what do I do exactly? The marketing firm I am working for provides in-market support to Canadian companies interested in trade development opportunities in Mexico and vice versa. We can do market studies, set up matchmaking opportunities, provide industry information and tips. Most of our clients are third-party relationships, sent to us by the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade. I am the token English person.

The irony that I moved to Mexico and ended up working for the Ontario government has not escaped me, by the way.

I don’t know entirely how someone with a background in theatre administration can end up an International Trade Marketer, but it’s an exciting job. It is busy and independent and involves a great deal of writing and research, both of which I adore. It is, in fact, quite close to what I was doing prior to moving here, save that my clients are now embassies and not theatre companies. And, best of all, the doors to my future are all wide open with this job; my predecessor is now working for the Canadian Embassy.

(If you’re wondering how we got around the entire immigration/what’s listed on your degree issue, we haven’t. As far as Migración is concerned, I am still just an English teacher. It’s not a complete lie: I still do teach a class every morning just for the hell of it.)

But there is a downside. Is there always a downside in life? Like a reverse silver lining? A muddy puce lining? Should I just come to expect and make arrangements for the inevitable muddy puce lining?

When my boss came to me on Tuesday with my very first paycheque, my very first reaction was, “Ah, this must be an advance. I’ll get the rest on the 1st.”

Mexico is a Third World country, no matter what the First World glossy overcoat of Mexico City might suggest, and I in no way believed that the earning potential here would be comparable to back home. Still, based on the salaries of those around me, I thought I could at least count on something reasonable. The marketing firm hadn’t been able to give me a firm figure in the interview, as it is a project-based company and therefore cannot provide a salary, so I had come up with a Worst Case Scenario of about $800 Canadian per month (a perfectly reasonable low-end living wage here).

What I received on Tuesday was a quarter of that. And, no, it wasn’t an advance.

So now I have a dilemma: is this the kind of position where you subsist on ramen noodles until your ship comes in (project-based work means there is earning potential there, as the company builds and more work comes) or, with student loans and visa screaming at me from Canada, is this a financial risk I simply cannot afford to take right now? And if I were to quit, I’d be quitting for what, exactly? Teaching English again, which wasn’t actually any better paying when you factor in all the cancellations and which was making me fundamentally miserable on account of its not-Real Lifeness? Do you hang onto what you have in the name of resume experience? Do you hang onto it while you look for something else? Do you take this as a sign that it’s probably not a good idea to be seeking a career path in a foreign Third World country? What do you do? And, in the meantime, how do you afford the $500 that you have to send home every month in order to pay the minimum payments on your debts?

I am conflicted. My gut says to stay with the job because, just as when I was debating whether to leave Toronto for Mexico, Plan A is maybe not your ideal situation but there simply is no plausible Plan B. Plan A is at least excellent experience, potential to meet some really interesting people in a field I could easily have a life in, and it is a positive working environment, even if it means I am facing my 31st birthday without any sign of financially being a grown adult.

And this is the right answer, I’m sure, both in theory and in practice. It’s just the simple math that’s stopping me from being entirely comfortable with that answer.

Mexican meat is always an adventure

2007-02-02T16:11:00.001-05:00

My stepmother will tell you: I am a lousy meat eater. My first pet was a rabbit and lamb should be bounding through fields bleating happily. I will not touch anything cute and/or little, and there are strict limits to the parts of the animal that I consider food. The further it is away from looking like the animal it came from, the happier I am. Insects might be low fat and high protein, but they’re still insects.

This past December, in the idyllic little town of Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico, I ordered breaded fish. I was envisioning, in my charmingly naïve way, standard American-style fishsticks – why, exactly, I’m not sure, since the cuisine of this country does not in any way resemble anything as common as battered Highliner fishsticks – so you can imagine my shock when I was presented with the entire fish.

The last time I was presented with an entire fish was at a Thai restaurant with my father and stepmother. My father and I, juvenile little twits that we are, insisted on covering the head and tail of the fish with our napkins before we would even consider it as food. My stepmother was suitably horrified but not particularly surprised. I’m quite sure that the lingering memory of the head and tail underneath the napkins meant that she ate most of the fish.

So there I am in Tulum, facing Whole Fish #2. I am not impressed but I am staring down at its pointy little grin and boggling eyes and thinking, well, Erika, here’s your chance to expand your horizons. Come on, Erika, you can do it. It’s just a fish, after all.

Sure, I could do it. My squeamish inner child was ordered into her corner, and Pavel taught me how the fins have the taste and consistency of fishy potato chips, there are little pockets of meat in the cheek sockets, and you can bite the top of the head clean off. It was – dare I say it – bordering on active fun, perhaps as much due to its voyeuristic appeal as its flavour. I very nearly took the carnivorous-looking jaws of Whole Fish #2 home as a souvenir of my accomplishment.

The fish eyes and brain, for the record, were not consumed.

And from that moment I embarked upon a self-congratulatory endeavour of Trying Everything Once. An endeavour that might just have ended today.

There is a comida corrida – “running food” – around the corner from my work which offers a soup, a plate of pasta or rice, an entrée, a dessert, and all the fruit juice you can drink for 30 pesos or about $3 Canadian. It’s not deluxe food by any stretch of the imagination but it’s warm and salty and fresh and so vastly superior to sitting glumly in the office munching on a bag-flattened peanut butter sandwich that there is just no contest.

The daily specials menu is in Spanish always and without details, but usually I can decipher enough to know whether I would be eating chicken or pork. At first I clung to the faves and the familiars, but as familiarity grows so too does confidence and bravado. Today, I ordered two things that I did not recognize: “pata” and “carnitas estilo Michoacan”.

The first, the pata, turned out to be the gelatinous, baby pink, vaguely translucent meat from the ankles of a pig.

The second, the “carnitas” or “little meat”, well, I’m not entirely sure what those little Michoacan-style cubes were but I’m pretty sure I recognized stomach lining and heart. And something with a fair sized white tube poking out of it. And more pata.

I ate a lot of the free bread today.

It is the line between intellect and ideology. I actually think Mexicans have it right when they eat every little inch of the cow, from its ears to its tail: it is more environmental, less wasteful, and considerably more respectful to the poor little animal that was born to be food. And what, exactly, makes stomach so much less appetizing than thigh, other than some deep ingrained belief as to what does and doesn’t constitute meat? Shouldn’t I be embracing this new ideology?

Yet leave me with the nearly empty remains of Pavel’s pozole (a kind of soup), pushing the leftover pig’s eyeball around with my spoon with the morbid fascination of watching a crime scene, and I… just… can’t… do… it. Not yet, anyway.

But I’m trying. I am.

Christmas in Merida - The Tale

2007-01-10T13:24:00.000-05:00

Traveling is exhausting, exhilarating, expensive and utterly essential to the healthy functioning of all human beings.

It had been bothering me immensely that I had lived in this divine country for five months and not stepped foot outside of this city (bearing in mind that this city is probably larger than 30% of countries). My excuse was money - teaching is fun but not lucrative work - but the wanderlust was eying my closeted visa card with increasing fervour.

Which is about when darling Pavel announced, with absolutely no fanfare whatsoever, that he had bought me a ticket to Merida for four days over Christmas.

The heat, he warned, would kill me. "You don't know the PAIN," he howled at me periodically (a warning which, once there, would morph into, "Here comes the PAIN!"). He recommended I bring two t-shirts for every day there - one for the morning and to change into in the evening - and not to bother with anything vaguely resembling warm clothes. I packed 65 SPF sunscreen and he bought me a beach hat.

And the adventure began.

I spent Christmas grinning maniacally at all the Spanish being flung about in the desperate attempt to convince everyone I understood them (a fallacy that did not escape the attention of P's 4 year old niece, who thought it was hilarious that I was also having to ask her "what? sorry? again please?"). We ate beets and cold spaghetti and they assured me this was traditional dinner. His parents even bought me Christmas presents.

And I slept at night on the itsy bitsy bed in which Young Pavel had dreamed dreams of escaping Merida, while Current Pavel cocooned himself in a nearby hammock.

Merida itself was... charming... and vastly different from the roaring splendour of the big city. Christmas morning we slept in, had a leisurely breakfast with the folks, caught the milkrun bus into the city centre, wandered around, had ice cream beside an American tour guide braying to her lemmings that it was okay, this ice cream parlour was "safe", wandered some more... - all before noon. Time is a vacuum in Merida: I was convinced my watch had stopped.

It was not, however, hot. Ah yes, says I to Pavel, I forgot to mention my freakish luck with weather. Do you all realize I have never been to Vancouver (as an adult at least) and had it rain?

Over the next couple of days, we went to Celestun to see wild flamingos and met a lot of P's friends, I did more maniacal grinning, and generally enjoyed it muchly. On the way back to Cancun on the 28th, we stopped off for a night in Valladolid, where I got to swim with da fishes in an underground lake and where we attempted to take in the chasmic Chichen Itza with 45 minutes until closing (at least there was no cover charge given the late hour).

Thursday morning, en route to Cancun, P says to me, well, 12:30 should be enough time to check in given that we only have carry on. Okay, says I, thinking, yeah, if we have no luggage then 90 minutes is more than enough time. Where exactly I got that our flight was at 2pm remains a mystery for the ages.

We're standing in line, quarter to one, when I mutter something about needing to buy postcards but, hey, I'll have the time to do that after we check in. No way, says Pavel. Flight's at 1.

By the time we'd frantically talked our way up to the front, the flight was closed and it was going to cost us $3000US to buy a replacement flight. Each.

Now, I am hideously horrible at changing plans with short notice; I go into serious snitfits, pouting matches, silent stormy rages. I remember watching a show once about the King's Cross fire, and how psychologists figure that so many people died because they had woken up that morning thinking, I will take the train to King's Cross, I will leave by the south elevator, I will turn right..., and they were unable to break from their scripts despite dire peril. That, my friends, is me. I would have died in King's Cross had I not been thousands of miles away at the time.

Yet my first thought at this point is, hey, we can stay!

And I am thinking this fervently to myself when P turns to me and says, hey, we can stay!

And so we do.

We spend two days in the beachfront condo of his friend (her father owns the hotel), with morning ocean swims and reading on white sand beaches until sunset. We daytrip to the fabled ruins of Tulum where I decide I don't actually find touristic ruins that interesting and successfully eat a fish with a head. My brain completely explodes when I go snorkeling in another underground lake, Gran Cenote, and what I thought was a shallow little ring of water turns out to be the gateway to vast underwater cathedrals. Friday night I lose my bank card in a fit of unbelievable stupidity (so pleased was I with my ability to withdraw money, I walked away from the machine without retrieving it). Spent the next three hours freaking out on the phone with my bank, who finally coach me on how to take out money on my visa without a PIN number. I do this Saturday morning, en route to the bus station, and all is happy.

Saturday we trundle our way back to Merida (four hours) and spend five pre-planned, leg-stretching hours having a surprisingly tasty spaghetti dinner (I was desperate for a tortilla-free meal, but skeptical of the quality offered) and a wander around the two so-called "sodomy parks" due to their reputation for gay pick ups. I dole out our limited money: a third to completely-broke P (he had emptied his account on the plane tickets originally, so everything post-Cancun was on me), a third to me, and a third in a hidden pocket for life once we return. Midnight rolls around, we hop on the bus for Palenque, in the state of Chiapas, and doze off happily for most of the eight hour journey to Chiapas.

Sunday morning we find ourselves a semi-fleabag hotel in Palenque and I go to get my cellphone so I can call my parents and tell them I'm alive. But it's not there. Oh my freaking GOD, I think to myself, first my bank card and now my cellphone! What kind of scattered idiot am I? It's not until I notice that all my cables (my phone charger, my iPod charger, my USB) are all gone that I start to get suspicious, because how do you lose something from two separate pockets?

The bastards.

Final count was my cellphone, my cables, my camera, my hairdryer, and all my money, including that in the hidden pocket. I was using my iPod at the time, so I still have that, though I can't recharge it. Pavel still had his third of the money and camera, although the thieves cut into his bag with a knife sharp enough to not only cleanly slice through the bag but two shirts and a pair of underwear as well. We're assuming it happened while we slept on the bus: we were in the second-last row, and it's not uncommon for pros to ride night buses and calmly rob the people in front of them before hopping off at the next stop. My bag was on the rack above me, which no one told at the time is an incredibly bad idea, so the guy probably casually grabbed it, took it to the bathroom, and went through every inch of it. Pavel's was on the floor in front of him, meaning that the guy most likely went through his legs, under the seat, with the knife. Makes me marginally happy we didn't wake up. I'm now counting on karma to sort them out.

So there we were in Palenque, almost all of our money used on the first night in our fleabag hotel, and several days to go until the bus home (thankfully, paid for back in Cancun). I sobbed for twenty minutes while Pavel watched in wide-eyed helplessness, then began the transition to "good story" and "adventure." Luis (my other roommate) wired us $250, giving us about $400, and I had my visa - it wasn't so bad, really.

We did some arithmetic and decided on the following plan of action: we would use my visa to pay for a hotel for the rest of the time there (which would require moving, as the fleabag was cash only), we would eat peanut butter and refried beans (not together) for the rest of the trip, we would spend two of the days just relaxing, and we would spend the remaining $200 on a day trip to the Palenque ruins (which are AMAZING - just incredible) and a couple of waterfalls: the epic Agua Azul and the magical Misol-Ha.

Things I learned while in Palenque: I, the original urban princess, don't mind eating refried beans and tostadas while sitting crosslegged on a hotel bed, and the only hotels that take visa in small town southern Mexico are 5-star resorts with swimming pools, mudspas, tennis courts, and inclusive buffet breakfasts (and amazingly only $1000 Mexican a night for both of us, which is more than I can afford but way less than it was worth).

So we're home now, tired and with about $20 between us in small change. Still, we're safe and alive and we've had an adventure, which is more than a lot of people can say.

There are pics up on Flickr if you're interested: www.flickr.com/photos/enorrie. And, without my darling camera friend, they'll be the last new ones up there for awhile...

And there's my story.

Affordable holiday options to the Third World!

2006-12-23T17:10:00.000-05:00

Mexico’s robust carpe diem mentality is a wonder, the hot blood of the Latino inspirational and devilishly sexy. Marry a Mexican man and you’re marrying your extended families – be ready for elaborate Christmas dinners with aunts you’ve not met before!

In the past five months, my life has centered around the upper middle class neighbourhood of del Valle, where I live in palatial splendour with three fluently multilingual intellectuals, the touristic glory of the Historical Centre, where I have my classes, and the occasional foray for coffee into the artistically posh charm of Coyoacan and the elite shrillness of Polanco. My Mexico, in short, is spacious tree-lined streets, golden angel monuments, and epic urban forests.

Laid against this background, Mexican culture is beyond charming, it’s downright adorable. If you never have to face the reality of life being rather precarious for a lot of the population, how absolutely wonderful is the focus on family and faith. If you never have to know a day without the ability to buy food, how intensely noble is the lack of a consumer culture. The refreshing simplicity of it all, you sigh, thinking wistfully of your consumer debt back home. Imagine putting an intimate knowledge of your extended family over new drapes for the livingroom!

There is, absolutely, a difference in priorities here. I currently am carrying around a comparatively staggering (considering what I earn) debt load because, on moving to Toronto four years ago, it was of the utmost importance to me that I furnish my two-bedroom apartment top to bottom, complete with facilities to comfortably house guests. There was a moment in IKEA, when the realization that I would have to content myself with a cheapo $500 futon rather than a nice $1000 wooden one hit, where I felt hopeless, a consumer loser. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.

The past month, during what I anticipated would be an emotionally trying week, I let most of it go with only nominal and well-ingrained materialistic doubt. It surprised me, actually, how easy it was, considering how important all that stuff had been to me in the first place and how it very nearly stopped me from making this journey. (Kisses to G and James for being my subletting buffer at tremendous personal cost, and to my parents for lining the back wall of their storage locker with the books and music I couldn’t bear to part with even this time around.)

Ostensibly it was to free me to travel, but I do believe it served to just simply free me: no more $500 IKEA futon to anchor me to Toronto. Here I can silver lining my financial situation (precarious, intermittent, unreliable) and label it an opportunity to understand the difference between need and want.

Ah, but see, there I go! That, exactly, is my point:

Oh those noble Mexicans with their $150 a month minimum wage, poor souls! Wouldn’t it be grand if I, wrapped snugly in the knowledge that a) I am earning considerably more than that, and b) I’m only ultimately a well-meaning visitor here and could leave in a second if or when the situation worsened, could learn such an important lesson from them? Won’t I be *such* a better person when I return to the First World with such clear thinking?

It’s the pennies into jars mentality: it doesn’t take much action for the circumstantially fortunate to feel good about ourselves without actually ever having to face the realities for the rest of the world. We can chastise ourselves for naively walking with eyes open into the credit legtrap all we want, but a few dollars to buy a goat for a village in Africa seems to level the playing field: they have goat milk, we can forgive ourselves for wanting a flatscreen television.

In the meantime, we will do everything in our power to reduce the shock factor of the have nots: we will buy lots of silver jewelry because it supports the local artists (and it’s just so darn cheap!), and we will marvel at how clean and well-kept all the cars are, and lament that we will likely never know that level of close family unity. We will give Mexico points in some inane competition against our own porcine culture, elevating their status to “economically poor, but culturally very very rich.” See, we tell ourselves, they don’t have it that bad after all. We can all relax and order another margherita.

But none of this is possible if you actually open yourself to the realities. My roommate – a Mexican national – recently spent a month in another state working with impoverished communities; after the second week, he returned pale and shaken, deeply disturbed not only by the fact of the poverty but by the fact that his country appeared to be doing nothing about it. One of my students, in a previous career incarnation, used to build schools in the same communities; he was never as much charmed by the noble offering of chicken for dinner as horrified that that might be the only meat that family would eat for weeks, maybe months, and that it was being wasted on him. (Since it’s rude to refuse food here, he took to bringing backpacks full of staples – beans, rice, dried meat, clothing – which he would in return force upon his hosts.)

And so they tell me stories, and I try to imagine but all I see are those baby cow-eyed little African children being cuddled by sobbing pseudo-celebrities seeking a checkmark to offset the public perception of their own DUI demons. I fall into the same trap of whipping my country for its fortunes and focusing only on how we ghettoize our Indigenous people into terrible conditions as if to say, see, I *do* understand.

And so I have guilt about my ignorance and naïveté, because maybe in some way it makes the obligation to understand go away. Call it Consumer Catholicism. Forgive me Father, for I have purchased new raw silk drapes from Pottery Barn when my old ones weren’t even faded or torn. Say ten Hail Visas, my child, and make an offering of only buying the second highest cable package tier. And maybe send over $5 to buy a goat for Darfur.

The Ex Mex once accused me of being a Third World tourist, which simultaneously shocked and hurt me deeply. I’m not, I protested to anyone who would listen. I want to learn! I’m here to learn! Teach me, oh wise country. Show me your beauty and your rot. Make we wonder at your wonders, and honour your traditions. Share your joy and your pain with me. Get me involved in your struggles and make me grateful to be Canadian.

I am a Third World tourist, not because I mean to be but because it’s all I know how to do. But that’s going to change somehow. I refuse to let myself off that easily.

Quantifying the visceral

2006-12-22T11:46:00.000-05:00

My father is coming to visit me in Mexico City in January.

I have been asking for this since I got here, in terms that he would have been challenged to refuse. It was so important for me to show him my city, to try to explain to him why I made this move. It would mean a lot to me, I said.

Now, suddenly, I am terrified.

My father has been to Mexico City before - on a business trip many years ago - so there is nothing about the immediate aesthetics of the city that will startle him. I don't have to be concerned about his reaction to the poverty or the pollution, and he's not terribly concerned about hiking the pyramids (an impossibility anyway given that the poor man has no cartilige in his knees anymore - bone on bone, baby - and is awaiting double knee replacement surgery in March) or doing the other touristy stuff. What he wants, I assume, is to see the city and my life here through my eyes.

But how exactly do you show someone a visceral reaction?

I have about a month to do a mental inventory of why I love this city so much. Some of it is touristy, in fact - I remain absolutely enchanted by the ruins of the Aztec great temple that they dug up right beside the 16th century cathedral in the centre of the city - and some of it will be culinary - god, the food here is good - but most of it will be attempting to find words and images for primitive sensations. I'm intrigued and intimidated by the challenge.

Things that make me happy about living in Mexico City:

1. The little green microbuses that hurtle down the sidestreets, loose benches bouncing, ubiquitous crucifixes swinging wildly from the rearview mirror. They'll take you anywhere you want to go in the city for under 50 cents, provided you know where to get on and where to get off (there are no maps or timetables - you learn the routes purely through word of mouth). They are the pinnacle of capitalism at its finest and its worst: as independent drivers who earn what they take in at the door, the buses may be ramshackles but, damn it, the driver is going to get you where you're going as fast as he possibly can (so that he can get more passengers).

2. The orgasmic gore of Spanish Catholicism. Raised as a defiant agnostic in gentle Protestant Canada, I've not witnessed Christ in all his bleeding glory before. There is a statue in the Catedral Metropolitana of Jesus post-whipping: bound to the wooden stake, bent over at the waist, the flesh of his back flayed to the bone. If you come visit me, I guarantee I will take you to visit him; I am endlessly fascinated by the psychology of such iconography. Corpses, corpses, corpses. Forget Christ risen in a miracle of love and redemption, blood is where it's at.

3. Street food. Yes, I know it's dangerous and the fact that my doctor ex-boyfriend told me that 30% of Mexicans have harmless cyst-like parasites in their brains should deter me, but my GOD is the street food good here. Among my favourite treats are cucumber or watermelon with chile and lime ($1), tacos with beef and cactus ($0.60), stewed corn with cheese and chile ($1), and those delightful, heart-stoppingly unhealthy tamales stuffed with cheese and hot peppers ($0.70). I try to convince myself that the secret is knowing which street stands are clean and which will give you bonus parasites with every enchilada, but I'm sure I'm tempting fate with every sumptuous bite. It's a lesson I'm going to have to learn the hard way, though.

4. The weather. In the summer, it is 25. In the winter, it is 22. It rains in the evenings in the summer, but otherwise it's blue 90% of the time. If it weren't for the pollution, this very well could be the best climate on the planet.

5. The passion. Of the people, not of the Christ, although I recently learned that, during Easter, the two merge when a pre-selected man gets whipped, cut open, and nailed to a cross for a day. Other fantastically non-Canadian sites: hundreds of completely nude men and women clambering over a statue in protest of something I couldn't quite decipher as my microbus whipped by; one million people (allegedly paid, some of them) crowding into the town square and the streets around it to sing, chant, roar, wave puppets and placards, and display butchered pig heads in the name of one politican or another; two million people crawling on bloodied hands and knees to the Basilica of Guadalupe on December 12th - some who have walked for days from other cities - to worship the Virgin Mary on the anniversary of her 16th century appearance to a [recently-canonized] Indigenous believer named Juan Diego.

Does it begin to capture the visceral sense, that list? Can I let my father into my reality a little if I show him Jesus of the Exposed Ribcage, and then ply him with a tamale?

It's a great thinking opportunity, mind. In 30 words or less, Erika, tell us why.

I'll get back to you on that one.

White

2006-12-11T16:20:00.000-05:00

We are all a composite of our genetics and our experiences, the result of where we have lived, what we have seen, what we have been told, what we believed, what we learned, what we felt, what we tasted. We are a little of our friends, a little of our parents, a little of our teachers, and, at least in the Westernized world, a fair amount of the media. And perhaps a little bit of self-determination, because there's something passive aggressive about just blaming everyone else.

I am 30 years as a Canadian, nuanced by 2 years in Britain, 4 in Sweden, and 5 months (tomorrow!) and counting here in Mexico. I am half Swedish and half British, but possess neither citizenship nor particular filial loyalty to either. I believe fervently in the leftist philosophies but find myself slowly but surely sliding to a lefty-middle as the years pass. I dropped a reasonably successful career in theatre administration to move to Mexico because, for reasons I’m not sure I could put words to, I am better, happier, more whole, when I am traveling. I landed in this city near paralyzed by fear and excitement.

Here I am usually American. “Estadosunidos?” they ask me. “Americana?”

“Pinche gringa,” some mutter on the Metro.

I sometimes challenge this assumption. “Why,” I ask, “do you assume? I could be Swedish, British, German, Australian… Canadian.” The reply usually has to do with the number of gringos versus non-gringos, comparatively. The assumption is usually correct, they say.

Touché, I admit grudgingly. But stop it. I’m not American.

I am presuppositions and illusions shattering with such speed and force that the falling shards are often hazardous to myself and those around me

Here I am, more than anything, white.

A young man stopped me last week to ask if I was an English teacher. He’s desperate to learn English, he explained to me, because he has a real thing for white girls. My skin, he tells me, is beautiful. Can he touch it?

No.

(He's also another penis story, for those of you who want to wallow in the baser side of my interactions with some of the men of this city. I mean, REALLY. I'm sure a ride on the Metro during rush hour could result in an unplanned pregnancy.)

I have always been white in that the pigmentation of my skin has not changed, but perhaps I never actually internalized that colour comes with political associations (ah, the luxurious naïveté of the dominant group). To be assessed purely on the basis of my skin – whether it means being revered or reviled – is utterly foreign and deeply repugnant to me. Multicultural Canada works very hard to maintain the illusion that our Crayola world of miraculous diversity is the same utopia for everyone in it, save those assholes who beat their own horrible and racist and ignorant drums and try to spoil it for everyone.

Here I am "guera": "blonde," despite not being blonde. Here, where you can show respect to someone by calling them "blonde." Here, where sometimes, at least in my increasing hyper-sensitivity to my foreignness, my "blonde"-ness is the most defining thing about me.

Wah wah wah, listen to her complaining about being white in a world where colonialism has bred a fondness for paleness.

But here's my issue: white, black – these are misnomers of a shocking level. Race has no political singularity; I am uncomfortable with the power given to me because I resemble distant colonizers. My particular breed of white is Swedish – a country where polite is never assuming you deserve anything – and Scottish – a country whose language and culture has been reduced to tourist shop kitsch by hundreds of years of English oppression. Scotland has more in common with Mexico than it does with England, at least in terms of the struggle for identity and culture, yet Rule Britannia determines how I am to be received globally.

Here the nuances of whiteness don’t exist: white means American means power means appeal means resentment. I am not Canadian, Scottish/Swedish, nor a citizen of the global community. I am not Erika, prodigal daughter on an adventure of learning. Here I represent a physical ideal and centuries of colonial damage.

Did you know that my generation's grandparents have been known to encourage intermarriage with whites because it "improves the race"?

Did you realize how big a market there is for skin creams that promise to lighten the skin of Mexican women - swarthiness caused, the marketers assert, by sun and aging, and which is deeply, offensively, horrifically unattractive.

My first attempt at a relationship here startled to crumble when he wouldn't stop going on about how I would be his first "white girlfriend" and how exciting that was to him. I never told him that he'd be my third vaguely cinnamon-coloured boyfriend and that that didn't matter a whit to me, although I did envy his ability to withstand direct sunlight.

But perhaps the biggest revelation for me has been in the emergence of a hyper-sensitivity about this issue. Again, nestled warmly in the bosom of my inadvertant domination, I used to prickle - indeed, I believe I even wrote a somewhat lengthy blogpost about it! - about minority groups of any nature who insisted at length about the constant harrassment and discrimination they face. I thought them to be reactionary, blowing a significant problem into incalculable proportions, and, perhaps, clinging onto their victimization as a means to preserve the value of their identity. Move on, I'd say, and maybe we'd get somewhere. Sheesh.

But whether it's based on fact or not, it really is difficult to be an other without becoming an Other, if you know what I mean. A handful of people comment on my skin colour, and suddenly I'm a floating island of political foreigness struggling against a tidal wave of outside opinions. If someone here thinks I'm beautiful, the thought does cross my mind that it is about my colouring, not me. If the woman at the post office steadfastly ignores my request for just three stamps please, I do walk away grumbling about discrimination. If I am not being defined externally based on the colour of my skin, then I am beginning to define myself as such.

I have nothing profound to say to answer these issues, other than they make me acutely uncomfortable on a fundamental level. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have to face this, though.

Four Month Assessment

2006-11-13T15:04:00.000-05:00

I hopped on that plane four months and one day ago.

It feels like I've been here a week. It feels like this week has been a holiday - a holiday which is about to end when I hop on a plane this coming Friday for what is technically a nine day holiday during which I will pack up my apartment in Toronto in order to stay here longer but which feels very much like a pulsing treacherous black hole of rationality from which I may never return.

In four months, I have:

* climbed the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan (the Sun Pyramid - the bigger one - was peaked last year during my first visit to the country).

* eaten more street food than anyone with a bit of common sense would recommend.

* polished my Spanish from that of a 18 month old to that of a three year old.

* ...a three year old who knows some awfully bad words.

* gotten myself embroiled in three different relationships with three different men: one in which I ran away from in a matter of days, one in which I ran away from in a matter of weeks, and one in which we both know we will both run away from some time in the definite future.

* fallen madly and deeply in adolescent puppy love with a luchadore (a Mexican wrestler) named Black Warrior who entertains himself between bouts by tossing the league's mascot - a little person dressed as a Smurf-blue monkeyman - at the audience.

* gone from a self-conscious, blundering TEFL teacher to the teacher with the highest feedback scores in the school.

* realized I don't hugely want to be a TEFL teacher anymore, but, as it turns out, actually DO need a career-type job to be happy.

* learned that white can be right and very very wrong all at the same time (there's a post on that in the works, I promise).

* discovered the joy of lime juice and chile on almost every kind of fruit you can imagine (no, seriously... it's AMAZING).

* started surveying Aztec archaeological sites with a jaded eye.

* gotten the idea that international relations, likely within the realm of communications and public affairs, would be a very satisfying future direction for me, and have already been in contact with the Embassy regarding alleged possibilities.

* learned why we pronounce "learned" as /lernd/ and "asked" as /askt/.

* been unable to drop my periodic bouts of self-victimization, although I grow increasingly frustrated with them.

* been invited to write for Inside Mexico, an English language magazine published here in the city, although the deadline for my first article is about to pass and I am having no luck finding the owner of a "dream house" for sale who will call me back for an interview.

* known many many moments of perfect happiness, several moments of sorrow, a handful of moments of fear, and barely any moments of boredom.

Four Month Assessment: Extremely positive, but requiring forward momentum (and some sucking it up) in order to remain positive for the future.

I am sorry for neglecting my blog. Blame it on not spending much time in front of the computer (compared to in Canada, Pavel, compared to in Canada) and being too mentally tired (I go to bed before 9 more than a couple times a week) to form complete sentences. But I do have several post that I scrawled by hand in my notebook whilst munching on cucumber/lime/chile or watermelon/lime/chile, and I will - I will - type them up soon. No, seriously. I will. I WILL! Stop laughing! I'm serious!

I miss you all.

Trying to catch my breath

2006-09-28T13:27:00.000-04:00

Things that don't seem odd or troublesome in Mexico City:

1. Not being able to see the mountains that frame the city in near walking distance more than a couple times a month.
2. Rejoicing in the nightly thunderstorms that shut down all activity by about 6pm because "at least they clean the air a little."
3. Thinking nothing of walking alongside eight lane freeways jammed with Volkswagen vans and Bugs belching black diesel smoke.
4. Being actively impressed to see a Volkswagen van that doesn't belch black diesel smoke.

Among the wider world, at least in my humble experience, the great City of Mexico is known chiefly for its danger and its near legendary pollution. (The burros, banderos, and mariachi bands exist, I assume, elsewhere in the country.)

People back home ask me about the pollution regularly - is it as bad as they say? is the air visibly orange? it is possible to breathe? Some locals have said, unsmilingly, that living here is akin to smoking a pack of unfiltered cigarettes a day. It took me several minutes of determined searching at the post office to find a postcard in which the skies above the cityscape was not visibly murky and languid.

The truth is, I don't really notice it, or I didn't until I woke up this morning with a sore throat and realized I am on the precipice of my fourth sinus infection in 76 days. Seriously, my friends, this is not right.

Sadly, nor is it uncommon.

Some pollution facts about Mexico City:

The atmospheric pollution here is one of the most severe pollution cases in the world. - GAIA Case Study: Mexico Urban air pollution in Mexico City

"Mexico City's air has gone from among the world's cleanest to among the dirtiest in the span of a generation... The average visibility of some 100 km in 1940s is down to about 1.5 km." - Air Pollution in Mexico City

"Mexico City used to have leaded gasoline and so the levels of lead in the blood streams of children were just too high. But the government was able to replace leaded gasoline with unleaded gasoline so that part of the program is under control. Carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide are two other pollutants that are essentially under control - their concentrations have decreased very significantly. But what remains, the two pollutants that are very difficult to control and are still very worrisome from the point of view of the health effects, are ozone and small particles- these particulates that can damage the health of human beings because they penetrate deeply into the lungs." - Air Pollution: Mexico City

"Teachers in Mexico City report that schoolchildren rarely use the color blue when they paint the sky. Instead, they use shades of brown and gray." - Staff Notes Monthly

That our bodies are having to struggle so intently just to function that we are left vulnerable to every miniscule immunological threat makes me painfully aware of the toxic stew that everyone else seems to notice exists here. To date I have done a remarkably good job at passing off the grungy air as laughable, ordinary, what the big deal smog - no worse than Toronto, I say, at least Toronto on a bad day - but I think it's time to face the facts.

Don't get me wrong: Mexico City is not dirty. I am charmed by the affectionate vigour with which Chilangos sweep, mop and scrub every inch of their property - yesterday morning I watched with some bemusement as a woman dutifully swept the tree-lined dirt patch outside her house. Litter, strangely, is not discarded on the streets but delicately and discreetly tucked into the crooks of trees, the latticework of fences, and other out of the way places (which always leaves me wondering whether it wouldn't just be easier to find a bin...). There is less spuit and gum and candybar wrappers in this entire city than you would find on one square city block back home (and we have a reputation for being so clean!!). Combine this care with the post-colonial architecture and the ubiquitous fountains and you have one quite lovely city.

Except for the air. Oh, air. Surely it should be possible to see the nearby mountains from the 28th floor of an office tower? Is that them, over there? No, there. That greyish shape in the mist. No? Yes? Maybe?

Mind-bogglingly, it's even apparently better than it was, pollution-wise. Several years back they implemented a rather inspired every-second-day driving law, based on the numbers of your license plate. This law, while not fervently followed by these rather free-wheeling people, did manage to cut down on emissions noticeably. I find this noble and impressive and wondrous, but, as I nurse another aching throat, borderline impossible to believe. It's a bit like telling me that the complete burial of Pompeii could have been worse.

The pollution - or, more specifically, my body's utter dislike for the pollution - is the first reason I've found not to stay here for very long. As charming and challenging as this city is, consciously doing this to my body for any length of time seems like a decision I will inevitably regret.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suppose Mexico did not sign the Kyoto Protocol.

La Ruida

2006-09-15T15:47:00.000-04:00

It is a common understanding that that which makes us great is generally also that which makes us weak. Take me, for example (a right I claim as the person wielding the keyboard): I would say that my best characteristic is my extroverted exuberance, yet doesn't the giggly determination that wins people on a good day also alienate and frustrate them on a bad? Martha Stewart is both widely revered and widely despised for her near-manic attention to detail and quest for the perfect centrepiece.

Mexico City is no exception.

My favourite part of the city: the noise. Taco stands, market vendors, whistling parking assistants, carhorns, children, young lovers, samples of pirated cds, howling corn carts, noisemakers, organ grinders, rattling peseros (little green buses often in questionable condition), birds that catcall flawlessly, the sharp r's and t's of Chilango Spanish.

My least favourite park of the city: the noise. I live in an amazing apartment, with a bedroom facing onto an open courtyard-y type area. Our neighbours - those right beside and those right above - bless them, know how to throw a party.

A few Saturdays back, I arrived home at 12:30am to the charming yet abrasive sounds of a live mariachi band and singer next door. I was mildly entertained by them - much like seeing kids playing street cricket (as opposed to street hockey) in England, what more proof do you need that you are living in Mexico than live mariachis?

At 2am, as the trumpets faded, the techno started upstairs. By 3am I was considerably less than impressed. By 3:30pm I was beginning to grind my teeth. By 4am I was borderline mental with seething rage. By 6am I was finally beginning to doze off a bit from sheer exhaustion. By 8:30am, as I was munching on my breakfast, the music... finally... stopped... (Which is, incidentally, about when my wild fantasies of ironic auditory revenge began.)

Pavel and Luis, in comparison, merely registered the all-night entertainment as happening. While I thrashed about and gnawed at my sheets and envisioned elaborate scenarios in which I trotted upstairs with a machine gun, Pavel and Luis dozed shallow-ly without concern. This, Pavel would explain to me the following morning, is how it's done, you see. Mexicans know how to fiesta without such frustrating limitations as sound level restrictions and neighbours who call the police.

Man I wanted to call the police that night. I've done it before, up in Canada. It was vindictively satisfying.

I don't enjoy having to accept this intrusion into my precious repose, yet it - as well as other things - have made me realize just how delicate and wound-up we Canadians are culturally. In fact, I have come to the belief that we are not so much nice, as foreigners allegedly insist we are, as much as we are stoically, determinedly obedient. We don't turn our music down at 1am because we want to respect the auditory needs of our neighbours, but because someone told us, some time ago, that that is The Proper Thing To Do. And, damn it, our middle name, collectively, has got to be Proper.

I believe this because I am shocked by the number of occasions in which I have turned away from something casually Mexican with a murmured, oh in Canada that would just be considered RUDE. Necking teenagers, teeth clicking in their fervour, are a regular cause of my prim horror. Double parking as well, although less so, and the ruthlessly elbowing and pushing required to actually get onto the Metro in the mornings. When our Argentinian guest remarked only on the underdone potatoes and overuse of pepper after I cooked her dinner, I was taken aback that she hadn't obeyed the choke it down and smile protocol.

I love my country very much, yet what shameless little Bluestockings we are! Will our lacy little underthings really get sullied if we were to try a little forthrightness? Will the sky fall if we creep out from underneath our parasols and shake it up a little?

So my neighbours kept me awake on Saturday night with their enviable cavorting, fine. Canadian propiety, as evidenced by my mortal offense, dictates that perhaps they should have packed up the trumpets before dawn's early light, and indeed that might well have suited the vast majority of the other residents in this building. Yet, really, if you stop to think about it, wouldn't it have been better if I'd been able to think, well, I'm not going to sleep tonight, maybe I'll go watch some telly. Or, better, what if I could have DARED to roll up my bloomers and just jumped in? These are people who know how to party - why call (or wish you had the option to call) the police on them! Join them! Knock on their door and say, hey, you're keeping me awake, hand me a glass and teach me the words to the next song!

Now, okay, fine, me knocking on a stranger's door and joining in the fray is about as likely to happen as, well, me overriding my Swedish/Scottish/Canadian squeamishness and trying sauteed ant eggs, chile crickets and many other of the sublime delicacies this country has to offer. But it's an interesting idea and a provoking realization of cultures colliding.

I will learn much from this country.

I feel the earth move under my feet..

2006-08-11T13:29:00.000-04:00

"Earthquake rocks Mexico City!" the headlines are screaming.

Yes, apparently there was an earthquake this morning. 5.9 too, so not a little one. Not a big one, but not a little one. Enough to ignite some fantastic hyperbole in the media.

I was sitting on the couch with my roommate, expressing some rather incendiary thoughts about this recent foiled terrorist attempt (who knew I would become a conspiracy theorist?), when he suddenly lept to his feet, headed towards the door, and said, "Come here. COME HERE."

"She is trembling," he explained, but I thought he meant the dog dutifully following us as is her way. I was still trying to figure out what he wanted to show me outside that had to do with allegedly corrupt governments. "I have no shoes!" I wailed. "COME HERE!" he said.

It wasn't until after he had manhandled me into the doorway that he showed me how the curtains were moving. And they were, I suppose, but BARELY. And, yes, I suppose the lamp in the livingroom was swinging BARELY too.

It took the first text message from my other roommate and then the minor flurry of concerned emails from friends back home before I actually believed there had been an earthquake.

And me? I'm disappointed. I hardly want to live through a bad one (and goodness knows this city is capable of them: 50,000 people dead in 1985 when the entire downtown collapsed from a 9.1 shudder) but a little one would be very very interesting. As a firmfooted Canadian, I can't imagine how disorienting it must be to have the earth shake underneath you. It's... fascinating... in a terrifying way.

So don't worry about me or my 24 million neighbours - we're fine. I'm guessing those working in the skyscrapers downtown felt it more, leading to the handful of building evacuations (especially considering many of those people would have lived through the 1985 quake), but otherwise it was anything but the jarring event the media are making it out to be.

Me and Mr. Happy Pants

2006-08-08T20:02:00.000-04:00

It is quite remarkable what one can become accustomed to. Sure, I have yet to figure out which seemingly innocent ingredient is making my pasta sauce almost candy sweet, but otherwise I am settling in nicely to a world of tortillas, cars with right of way regardless of pedestrian signals, rain falling at 6pm every evening like clockwork, and having to check my ubiquitous blue bag at the entrance of every store I enter.

But the Metro! The Metro! What sort of daily ordeal is this?!

To be fair, nothing happened to me this morning, nor does anything happen to me more than three quarters of the time I use the city's remarkably inexpensive and efficient public transit system. In fact, having been here only a few days shy of a month (!!), there have only been a handful of encounters.

"Handful." Ha! Pardon the pun.

As in many countries, save at least rigidly insecure Canada, the men here can be a little aggressive. I've been warned about impromptu lapdances from men "clinging" to the handrails because it's just "so crowded" that their hips "have to" jiggle in front of my face, and I have on several occasions been more than a little unsure as to whether the gentlemen behind me might not actually have a flashlight in his pocket.

Yesterday, I claimed my first revenge. While making the journey home, a kindly 60+ gentlemen, who moments before had caught me genially when the train made an unexpected lurch, opted to steady himself for the longer term by laying the flat of his hand against my left hip. At first I thought I was imagining it, it was his bag, or his arm, or, but then I felt it begin its nearly inconspicuous slide inwards. After attempting a passive aggressive lean away (and into the flashlight of someone else) and discovering the hand dutifully following, I felt I had no option but to bring my cellphone hard down across his knuckles. There was no further fondling.

This kind of interaction bares absolutely no relation to actual personal or sexual interest: perhaps the thrill is the renegade anonymity or the lecherous immediacy. I can feel the difference immediately on those rare occasions when I am approached with sincerity: two men thus far have shyly stuttered out the same old flattery that is often hissed as I walk through the market, yet I actually smiled and blushed. After a frantic fondle in the Metro, I am angry, disheveled, and badly in need of a shower. My personal space - something that seems ever expansive - shrinkwraps to a millimetre from the surface of my skin; I fight the urge to snarl, "no me tochas!" at everyone around me, nevermind the fact we are squeezed into the train car so tightly I am convinced I could lift both feet up from the floor at once.

Suddenly the "solo damas y ninos" cars make sense. They seemed a bit precious when I first saw them, but now the conspicuous glare of anti-gringa Latinas seems a much preferable option.

I can't even begin to imagine what persuades these paramours that this is acceptable behaviour towards a stranger. It's not ethnic fetishizing or degradation, because it happens universally across the pigmental pallet, and if it is a part of the inherent culture than it's a part not immediately evident in your dealings with these genuine, welcoming people.

From the little I know and the fraction of reality I've seen thus far, my impression is that Mexican women are undergoing a kind of renaissance. Mexico is a very traditional country: men live at home with their mothers until they are married, at which point the wife takes over as mother (or sometimes just moves in and begins the eternal competition). Machismo is rampant; I was warned not to offer help to an elderly man struggling to push his stalled car out of a busy intersection because of the shame, the shame of it. Women are not so much helpless little dolls tottering around in ridiculous clothes to conform to perceived male taste - that would be my culture - but rather fiery souls... who know their place...

Yet it seems to me that my generation of Mexican woman is a bit frustrated with the constraints of these roles. Most of my girlfriends still talk of needing a husband and babies to feel complete, yet there is a reclamation - or perhaps a claiming? - of their inherent person-ness, independent of gender. This appears most evident in their sexuality: forget the question of whether they need to remain a virgin until marriage, these girls flaunt their right to say yes OR no with a confidence unequalled by their "emancipated" northern sisters.

So will this mean the end of Mr. Flashlight Pants in the Metro? I have trouble believing that the average feline Mexicana is willing to shelve both her fervent desire for a loving family and her determination for sexual autonomy long enough to tolerate these attacks. And, if it is about anything even remotely more than a covert thrill - a thrill because it is covert - then I imagine these greasy few men will start to adjust their technique. If not, and it is just about a lusty flash of friction, then I imagine they will start losing fingers.

And the next person who touches me without permission will be the first.

Pepper pepper pepper salt

2006-07-25T22:11:00.000-04:00

I’ve never been more than mildly aware of my skin colour, beyond the lingering guilt regarding the need for regular sunblock. If I was white, it was incidental – the people around me were white, brown, red, black, blue, caloo calay. Skin colour was like hair colour: without intention, without value, without notability.

Canadian playwright Djanet Sears states in her play Harlem Duet (and I paraphrase) that she likes going to Harlem because everyone there looks like her. I cannot within reason deny that Harlem contains a higher percentage of her particular epidermal tone, to be sure, yet I never really understood why that was such a big deal. Sitting on the subway in Toronto, surrounded by the many hues of the world’s allegedly most multicultural city, I thrilled in the sameness of our differences. Why would you want to be in an homogenous group wherein you could disappear, unremarkable and ordinary? How is that preferable?

I was looking forward to being a güerita in Mexico, perhaps a little. Mexico is, like every other country on this blessed planet, racist. According to my friends here, the ease in which you will find success in life in often directly in proportion to the lightness of your skin. As one who is almost translucent, this assumedly places me at the top of the pigmental pyramid. In October, clutching onto Pável in the marketplace, keeping my head low with shyness but laughing out loud, it was exciting to be called out to like I was some wonderful, unusual bird. The label “güerita” – despite being, in essence, quite diminutive – conjured up notions that I was special, desirable, unique.

And, if I am to show my hand in the name of self-revelation, I’ve had moments of race-based arrogance since arriving. Pável teases me about the way men look at me here – they are undressing you with their eyes, he says deliciously, this is your opportunity – and it has become tradition for me to relay any creepy encounters I’ve had with slavering men as though they are a logical extension of my pallour. Mexican mothers will want me for their sons, I am warned, because they want güero babies. Mexican women will hate me for the innate power I have over the men. A continual stream of race-based assumptions that place me as somehow… what?... superior? It starts to rub off a little, causing me at times to catch someone’s eye and think to myself, oh yeah, eat your heart out, baby.

Yet while it’s romantic to think of yourself as some exotic superstar, it’s also utterly unsustainable regardless of how charmingly arrogant you may be. Back home, basking unwittingly in the warm embrace of being a member of the majority culture, I mistook the experience of being the same for the experience of being different. Genially naïve, I could not see the politics involved when the difference is ethnic.

Here, I am like a houseplant placed in the centre of the room – a sensation that is far less romantic and exciting than that of being some glimmering luminescent glow. Standing on the Metro on the way to work in the morning, I am unable to settle into that vague centre of nowhere state of being practiced so sternly on public transit back home, as it is impossible to not notice the swiveled heads. Rarely an intense lecherous gaze or a critical glare, most often it is the look of vague curiosity I myself have likely levied on women in burquas or other uncommon sights. If I smile in a wan attempt to dispel the tension (likely entirely on my end), I rarely receive one back.

And suddenly I am acutely uncomfortable. I feel as though the room has gone silent when I enter, not because the people around me are desperate to hear my first words but because they are mildly surprised I decided to show up at all. It is intensely intimidating, I am currently in the habit of rushing home after work and taking refuge in the safety of my home rather than having to endure the pervasive sense of objectification for longer than I have to.

This is new for me, and insightful.

Brave new world

2006-07-18T11:40:00.000-04:00

Fighting off bursts of fatigue brought on, no doubt, by six months of fretting, worrying and all of manner of burning energy best used elsewhere, I managed to brave the new world today all by myself for the first time and I went to the grocery store.

I’m not feeling particularly confident or comfortable yet – it’s too soon, too soon – but the yawning gaps that are my allotted shelves in pantry and fridge respectively are quite adamant that I do something about them. So I do.

Generally I like going to the grocery store in foreign countries. It’s an edible snapshot of the culture: in Toronto, it’s frozen green Thai curries and pizza pockets as far as the eye can see, while here it is piles of tropical fruit, row upon row of spices, and a tragically familiar stack of Count Chocula.

Except it’s not called Count Chocula. I’ll have to make a note of the Spanish name next time.

I start off well: I pick up fresh avocado, two lovely mangos, carrots, bell peppers, garlic. I grab a bag of muslix and a container of yoghurt. Bread, cheese. Chicken breast. Not entirely sure what I’m making for dinner out of this motley crew but my cart is filling up nicely.

I’m getting a bit cocky now. When I see an aisle full of pop and juice, I get all worldly and sage-like: ah yes, thinks I knowingly, I should probably pick up something to drink while I’m here. Hepatitis in the water, you see. Everything must be bottled.

There are a LOT to choose from – it’s exciting. I spend a few moments jubilantly deciding between the fruity looking red drink in my left hand and the sporty looking blue drink in my right hand. I’m a little bit put off by the fact that neither one is telling me what flavour it is with a jaunty dancing strawberry or whatnot on the label, but nothing’s that easy in life. Eventually I decide on the fruity looking red one.

I’m just about to leave when I spot the Pine Sol. For a second I think, “wait, why are they selling Pine Sol in the juice aisle?” Then I realize there IS a jaunty label on my bottle of fruity red drink… of a mop.

Three aisles over, I pick up a bottle of Coca Light (Diet Coke).

Un Sueño

2006-07-05T12:05:00.000-04:00

It’s 7:48am and I’m sitting in the waiting lounge at the International Airport, pathologically using the building’s power outlets to charge my iPod in the vain hope that it will last the entire length of my journey. In my usual inability to resist the “now or never!” marketing of the magazine shops, I am munching from a bag of white pistachios (I hate how the pink comes off on your fingers).

We’re already ten minutes late to board, and a faint line of cautiously impatient passengers is starting to form in front of the gate. A perky brunette and a red-faced man are whispering genially behind the desk as they wait for the predetermined signal. The terminal is surprisingly quiet for the number of people in it.

Me, I’m… surviving. My sorry attempt at a 4:30am breakfast is churning away, my fingernails chewed down to bloody nubs. At this moment, I could point out all six of the emergency exits, including an assessment of which ones are alarmed and which will lead me into the bemused arms of waiting security guards. I have, at several distinct moments, cursed the foolish bravado that caused me to believe this was a good idea.

The gate personnel are gathering. The line of cautiously impatient passengers solidifies in excited anticipation, brandishing their passports like little engine starters.

When the perky brunette finally leans in to welcome first class passengers and those requiring extra assistance, it’s as if everything inside me liquefies all at once. It becomes so clear, like a flickering fluourescent light blazing into life. What was I thinking? I can’t do this.

Pistachios scattering, iPod tumbling, I make a bolt for the nearest exit.

But the brunette has had her eye on me, and she’s been in this business long enough to know what to expect from my brand of wide-eyed shivering. She tosses her fistful of boarding pass stubs to her red-faced colleague and lunges over the desk after me. I can hear her shouting my name as we slalom through waiting passengers and hurdle lounge chairs. I throw water on the floor as I pass a drinking fountain, but she deftly leaps over the puddle. I push a screaming six year old with ribboned curls into her path but she sends the jubilant tot off with plastic wings and a postcard of a plane without even breaking her stride.

She’s gaining on me.

I plunge into the nearest Duty Free and duck behind a massive case of Toblerones – milk, dark and white. It’s quiet. I think for a brief moment that she didn’t see me turn in. I am wildly overjoyed.

Then I hear the quiet clicking of the conservative heels on her classic shoes cross the store’s threshold. She is so calm, so cool. She makes hushing noises as she stalks the aisles.

“Everything will be okay,” she’s whispering. “Everything will be just fine.”

She is in the perfume aisle. I realize I am trapped between the Toblerones and the Marlboros.

“We are now boarding rows 15 through 22,” she’s cooing. “Please let me know if I can help you in any way.”

I survey my ineffectual little hideout. The deadliest weapon available is nougat.

And there she is, rounding my corner and offering me a complimentary blanket and pillow with a practiced smile. But I am ready: I fling a handful of cigarettes in her face and sprint past her as she sputters and claws at her eyes. She is howling my name.

I don’t get far. Before I’m even through the doors of the Duty Free, it is complimentary blankets and pillows and smiles in all directions. Her colleagues have arrived. I am surrounded.

“This is your final boarding call,” a dark eyed fellow murmurs at me.

I make one final lunge, red rover red rover, but the red-faced man has me by the ankles and I’m on the floor. I kick and I claw but I can’t escape now, and, deep down, I know it.

Over the shoulder of the red-faced man, I see the brunette rising with a wry smile. She leans in close, close enough for me to smell the soap and tooth whitener, and beams.

“Estimated flight time is four hours, thirty one minutes,” she whispers. "Welcome aboard."

I am a donut

2006-06-21T15:20:00.000-04:00

This is why I'm jumpy when speaking a foreign language:

This morning, I sent an email to Pávelito saying, in Spanish, "Three weeks! Are you excited?"

What I should have written, according to a roaring Pável, was thus: "¿Estás emocionado?" or "¿No te emociona?"

Instead I wrote, thanks to the good makers of Babel Fish translation, "¿Estás excitado?"

Or, in English, "Three weeks! Are you horny?"

Well done, Ka. Well done.

Life Lesson #542,348 (Or, Why Healthcare Should Not Be Private)

2006-05-25T15:37:00.000-04:00

Two months ago, during my annual physical exam/procedural assault, I brought up the subject of Hepatitis A and B shots with my doctor. A very good idea, she said, particularly given how prevalent it is in Mexico. Her clinic charges $120 but any convenient travel clinic will do.

So I did a little comparison shopping in the name of finding a place close to work, and found a private travel clinic right across the street that said it would be $110. Deal, says I, and booked my appointment.

Today was said appointment.

I had my $45 five minute consultation with the perky and shockingly casually-dressed doctor, wherein she confirmed everything I knew already ("you're going to Mexico? Okay, you'll need Hepatitis A and B...") and then sent me off to the nurse for the shot.

Shot done, the nurse says to me, okay, we'll see you next week for the follow-up.

There are more?!, I cry with needle-inspired nausea.

There are more. There are four, it turns out. This one, one next week, one in three weeks, and one in two months. The receptionist will know to book the appointments when I pay my bill.

I pay my bill. $110, thank you very much.

I keep standing there. Without looking up, the receptionist says, Good afternoon, can I help you?

Follow-up appointments, I remind her.

Right, she says, Your name?

For a second I think she's joking, because she asks me this questions as she's filing the proof of payment into MY FILE. She's not joking. I point to the file.

Right, she says, How's next Thursday?

I'm just about to leave when I have a thought. Is there another consultation fee for next week?, I ask.

The receptionists look at each other, shrug, tell me they don't know. When I don't walk away meekly, they fumble for the clinic brochure. Yes, they affirm, $15.

I am displeased. I pretty much demand why they think they can charge me an additional $30 when they had told me when I called the shot was $110.

But the shot *is* $110, they insist. Each shot. As in $110 x 4.

I lose it. I may have used words like "scam" and "lies." I know I created a mild fuss because the two people in the waiting room both ask me for details. But it's a mild fuss, because I'm not a large fuss person - I just want someone to explain to me why no one told me until this particular moment that this shot would be over $400 because I don't have $400 but now I'm in this far and what happens if I don't get the other three shots? Is it like antibiotics? Will it make me sick? Instead, the head nurse comes in to tell me curtly that "that's the price" and then she "whatever"'s me, turns her back on me and WALKS AWAY.

By now there is a little crowd in the waiting area, all murmuring "what's going on? what happened?" and the receptionist is telling the doctor that I'm "confused" and the head nurse is giving me attitude like I have never experienced before in my life. I finally hand back the 10% Off Your Consultation Fee referral coupons they gave me with a steamy "yeah, I don't think I'll be needing these" and I leave. I can hear the chaos behind me until the elevator door shut.

Back at the office, I call my doctor to book the follow-ups. And do you know what I learn, my darlings? Not only is the shot there only $60 per, but I only need two of them - one today (the one I got is good enough) and one in a month - and not FOUR, as stated by Dr. Corrupt and Her Merry Band of Thieves.

I am now on a one-woman mission to bring down that scam artist clinic across the street. I'm not entirely sure how, but I'll figure something out. Pickets or BBB or chain letters. Word of mouth. Something. I am *pissed*.

I'm also a bit concerned: even though they charged me more, how do I know that they gave me the same single dose as the other clinic would have? What happens if it's less and the inoculation isn't complete?