a little of everything

this evening, mother nature has decided to stick with her tried and true ritual and pour rain on my head and scream thunder in my ear. so i find myself cozied up at my usual internet cafe to upload my photos on flickr. i am sorry to say, but despite alfredo's best intentions, the fancy file sharing/internet loading plan just ain't panning out. i'm okay with it, and it has even left me to experiment with the upper limitations of my dingy little computer spot. i have multiple flickr pages open and uploading, so an explosion could spice things up at any moment.

i have had an interesting week and a half or so. it was very mellow and meditative/occaisionally lonely, with my crazy new roommates to keep me entertained intermittently, for awhile before three of my closest girlfriends paid me a visit south of the border over the past weekend. anne, celene, abbe and i painted the town red and then some... my feeble blogging efforts of late leave me with a momentous task, but we'll take it a little at a time.

first, under the influence of my young and wild roommates and their innocent-seeming accomplices, i drank one of these. that's all it took to remind me that i am elderly in comparison to these squirts, and that amount (called a "yarda"... and it isn't too far off from what you would imagine a cubic yard to be) of any sort of alcoholic beverage - even unrefrigerated apple cider - should never be made to enter my system. it made for a fun saturday night and a completely useless sunday. they have been friendly in inviting me along when they go out and i was happy to be included... they have a pretty tight-knit crew in their study abroad program - all from UC campuses - and it was fun to get to know some more of them. unfortunately the evening also included an overzealous pursuit from a mexican suitor who first bought me my second (!) yarda, and showed us around san ángel for the rest of the evening. i felt comfortable since he clearly understood my unavailability... but he then persisted to the point of showing up at my front door a few evenings later (we had shared a cab at the end of the night on saturday, which none of us - admittedly - thought twice about)... eventually i made my point understood and thus have had another lesson in just how aggressive mexican men can be. it will be nice to go out with brendan at my side, since out of sight out my mind seems to be the philosophy that rules the courtship day in these parts.

the following week was pretty low key. i had recently discovered the cineplex within walking distance of my house that plays lots of indie and foreign movies and was starting to gobble up anything in the english language that i could get my hands on. so i checked out thank you for smoking (pretty good, overall) and tarnation (horrible, which i knew it would be but it has had a sort of irresistable masochistic appeal for me since i first heard of it). so i passed the time waiting for my girls to come visit with thoughts of the tobacco industry and families troubled by endless histories of severe mental illness. the worst part of suffering through tarnation was that as the credits rolled, i was reminded that the homecoming queen (and cousin of my best friend growing up) of my very own alma mater had a bit part in it. i had read about it somewhere, but had forgotten about it until i saw her name rolled up the black screen as pleasant indie rock played. too late though... i won't go through it again, even for the chance to confirm a by-association brush with fame.

a small boy just came up and tried to sell me gum. that happens all of the time in this cafe, but it is usually a different boy, younger and - harsh, i know - cuter. the boy tonight stayed and stared at my screen for what seemed like an eternity. i almost wanted to start reading it to him as a bedtime story, he was so transfixed. but then he was excorted out. that never happens to his younger/cuter counterpart. i found it to be kind of harsh since he wasn't bothering me. but i also wasn't going to buy gum, so maybe he was forced to move onto a more lucrative locale. speaking of gum, i went to two meetings of the pro-choice alliance after work today... at one, one of the E.D.'s who was there started passing around gum that she had brought back from a meeting in new york... there was quite a to-do over a jumbo pack of juicy fruit. and it finally registered that all kinds of gum here are called chiclets. as in "chiclets", as far as i can tell, is the word for gum. so these were juicy fruit chiclets. i can't quite wrap my mind around it.

i would like to do the weekend visit justice, and i really have to pee, so i will save those details for a later date. i got a little camera happy at times, so flickr gives the gist in pictures.

i leave three weeks from tomorrow which has my head in a bit of a spin. i cannot wait for brendan's visit at the end of next week, but the thought of all that awaits in seattle upon my return is a little overwhelming. a probable move ending in cohabitation with b, finding a job, start of classes, leaving mexico city's rainy season just in time for seattle's rainy season (if 8 months counts as a season). at the very least, seattle's endless thai food options and meals without a tortilla anywhere in sight promise to help me readjust in comfort.