Particulars

So today (whilst floating around in my preoccupied way) I had to go to the Instituto Nacional de Migracion to sort out my visa. Outside in the sunshine and the cool air, with lots of other people milling about and waiting for people and appointments, is an excellent place to people watch*. Lots of Mexicans of course – all kinds of people – studenty types, business types in suits, homely-looking middle-aged ladies, women dressed up to the nines with pointy boots and pouty lipstick lips. And a few white faces, which I found myself scrutinising – I suppose because they’ve become the exception, an anomaly in Mexico City.

You wonder about people’s stories, where they’ve come from or where they want to go to. The pale, white guy, stubbly hair and a pursed sort of mouth, with a Mexican girl – the young black guy with dreads (you don’t see many black faces here either) – the Mexican man carrying his pale, blonde baby – the monk in grey robes looking like he’d stepped straight out of an illuminated manuscript – the three generations, a young mother, her mother, her sweet toddling girl – the goateed priest sauntering along with his hands in his pockets…

It paled as an amusement for the last twenty minutes of waiting, when I was already supposed to be inside and the woman who was going with me still hadn’t turned up, but I couldn’t help being pleased to add another priest to my collection of berobed men, nor staring at the incredibly loud American woman with her mother and two Mexican-looking sons, one of which she thought she’d lost when actually she’d left him behind. Nor gazing, inside, at the heavily pregnant girl with the wide, beautiful face like a pixie and masses of dark hair in waves and ringlets, and her boyfriend who looked Mexican but turned out to be German (I sneaked a peek at his passport).

Without people to rudely stare at I clearly would have gone insane – it turns out two hours of travelling and an hour and a half of hanging about was all just so that I could sign my name three times and provide some thumbprints. Oh, and receive, not just any visa, but an entire extra little green book that is actually bigger than my passport. I have filled in, and others have filled in on my behalf, masses of paperwork – twice, due to some cock-up somewhere – I have provided photos from the front and the side, I have practised signing my name so it actually looks like the signature in my passport… and for what? Seeing the great stacks of paper in that vast hall of marble and columns and booths and office cubicles, I can’t think that anyone ever actually looks at them. But we’re all stamped and signed and filed away, so that’s alright.

For your amusement, here is my favourite form (in the original format it comes weirdly laid out, with tick boxes, which I have ticked with the abandon that comes of having absolutely no idea what a migration official might imagine the shape of my nose to be). Both times I have filled it in it has felt like some kind of unexpected and bizarre joke.

PARTICULARS:

Height:
Age:
Physical Characteristics: thin – medium – stout
Complexion: white – light brown – brown – black
Hair: dark brown – black – red – grey – albino – white – dyed – blonde
Forehead: narrow – regular – wide
Eyebrows: scarce – bushy – plucked
Eyes: brown – blue – black – green – grey
Nose: concave – straight – convex – wide
Mouth: small – big – regular
Chin: oval – round – square
Moustache: scarce – trimmed – thick – none
Beard: scarce – trimmed – thick – none
Distinguishing marks:

A work of peculiar genius, no?

*Across the street there is also an intimidatingly modern building (very blonde, lots of squares) with the most sophisticated and hypnotic fountain I have ever seen – a very long row of jets doing all kinds of crazy things – Mexican waves, jets made up of spurts of ever-increasing height, alternating patterns, you name it. Funny place, Mexico City.

Diving for bricks, the water resisting, the sting of chlorine in your nose

Today I am mostly preoccupied with wondering what the really good things to be are, the really fine and important qualities a person can have and that one might aspire to. And the relationship between what a person is like and how they are - whether you can come up with a set of adjectives that is anything more than more or less arbitrary and/or generic.

What are the things that really express a person’s essence, and how do you know, and what really matters in a person?

Just an easy question to be getting on with. Answers on the back of a postcard please...

Sometimes I think that bit of my brain that people have that enables them to understand about other people having minds and emotions is one of the Slow Swimmers, still needing armbands – and a float too*. Because when I really think about other people really having selves (or even myself, I suppose) it seems so incredibly ineffable and incomprehensible…

*And what a lot of memories that thought dredges up – the smell of chlorine, humid air, the tiny swimming pool at my primary school, a boy who was a slow swimmer, a girl too, the changing sheds, talcum powder and the inevitable veruca sock that someone always had, summer days, the field, the quick space of bright light and air between the dimness of the pool at the dimness of the changing room, blue check summer dress against damp skin… Astonishing. Perhaps people are like trees, growing a new layer, a new skin, every year, but all the old layers are still there, in the heartwood.

Busted

Last week I turned on my computer to find an email from Mike letting me know that google kindly sent him my last post as the first entry on his weekly google alert for new webpages including the name of the centre.

I felt extremely embarrassed.

Google alerts, who knew? Bloody technology. So as a result I have removed pretty much all the instances of the name of the centre, which will henceforth be known only as ‘the centre’ in a very slightly sinister way.

He was nothing but nice about it, but really… I’ve been blithely typing away, figuring I wasn’t going to say anything that could get me sacked or hated, without really considering any intermediate options – like just the general embarrassment and awkwardness of people here reading what I think about things.

Yeah, I know… duh. It’s the bloody internet, innit. Will the proud recipient of the headmaster’s special award for denseness please stand up.