Sturm und drang

This afternoon:
The sky darkens gradually from misty white to deep, swollen grey. A wind comes up from nowhere. The thunderstorm begins. Lightening cracks again and again, like there’s a whip-happy cowboy up there with white light to play with. The sky echoes with explosions. It rains and rains.

I have seen so much lightening here, more storms than I have in the past several years I think.You get rather blasé about it. And getting wet I don’t like. And the building pressure, the dark skies, the intensity of the storm, the rain and rain, they make me a bit all-over-the-place and crazy.

But I do like the storms. Thunder and lightning and rain on windows. They chase the people away like ants, and they are overwhelming and awe-inspiring and frightening… and I do like them, yes.

Oh, the power’s just gone out. I shall light candles and enjoy the rain.

It is lovely.

*

Later:
Power (and therefore internet) is back. It is very quiet outside. I suppose I should be grateful for the food not anymore defrosting in my freezer compartment... but, candlelight and slowly-falling darkness and silence, it is very good to have those things imposed sometimes.

Neblina

In the last couple of weeks or so, the weather has definitely taken a turn for the warmer here, and we seem to have left the cold half of the year. So I’m not going to bitch about it. Sure, it is also now the rainy half of the year, and it almost always in the part of the day that is after you have left the office and before it is dark. On the other hand, when it is not raining I love the long, light evenings, with kids riding their bikes about the houses, and a summery feeling in the air.

But, all the grey clouds and the FOG in this weather forecast made me smile - more like home than how one imagines weather in Mexico:

I wouldn’t say it was foggy myself, just a little misty and cool, with a blank white sky, and the birds singing seeming a little melancholy, rather than joyful as they do when the sun shines. I rather like it.

I shall think of home, and sing in the rain.

Or possibly just play volleyball in it, if it starts raining anytime soon. (We did that last week, played on as the drizzle started and then the thunder and lightning. Then when the heavens opened we ran for cover and beers like cockroaches when you turn the light on. Brilliant).

Shopping

• I ended up buying a tent today, for the purposes of climbing a mountain at the weekend. It’s nice to have a tent, for future adventures. Its miniscule size when folded and its miniscule price tells me it may be a really terrible tent. I think I might get wet if it rains.
• Last week I happened to lie in someone else’s hammock, and felt about a million times more relaxed, as if I was floating. And boy do I need me some of that. So at the weekend I shopped around and got myself a very lovely hammock. Which is awful exciting. Today I went to buy rope to attach it to trees with, in a hardware shop full of fascinatingly useful things. My favourite things were the wheels – all kinds of sizes and designs of castors. It made me a little wistful that as a child I never made a go-cart for careening dangerously down hills in, out of packing cases and old pram wheels, like they do in the stories. When I have kids, I’ll definitely make go-carts with them. Or is it the kind of thing which is only fun if your parents tell you not to and it’s far too dangerous? How sad it would be not to be part of the fun…
  Anyway, the men who served me smiled and were pleasant and didn’t look at me like an alien or an idiot, even when I had absolutely no idea when I wanted (I need some rope to hang up a hammock. I don’t know, what kind of rope do you think I need? Oh, I don’t know how to decide, how about this (points to one of suggested rope types at random). Hmm, what size do you think I need? Oh, and how much do I want? Hmmm…). Miraculous, in a very tiny way. Were I to have further hardware needs, it’s back there I would go. (There is no way to write that sentence without it being open to a smutty interpretation.) (Unless that’s just me.)
• Small golden peaches are some of the best things in the world. I am just getting used to how delicious they are, and how I should buy lots.
• If you were here you’d have heard even more about how much I want a kitten, or kittens. You might well want to bury an ice pick in my head. Just as well I’m thousands of miles away. But I really do. I went to the shop for some hamster food, and there were sad little puppies, and the most beautiful rabbits, and all kinds of rodents and fowl and reptiles and fish, and most of all there were kittens. I know it’s silly and anthropomorphic and frankly ridiculous, but they mewed at me and looked at me with their enormous eyes for all the world as if appealing to be taken home. A grey tabby which stared proudly, like a little tiger. A no-colour, miserable-looking little kitten with gummed up eyes, needing rescuing. But the one I wanted most of all was the little Siamese, which seemed sweet-natured, neither aggressive nor apathetic, and had huge bright blue eyes.
  Oh dear. Don’t be surprised if I cave in in a moment of weakness and acquire a cat.
• Similarly, I also didn’t buy a doughnut, or doughnuts, because even though I wanted to and it would bring me pleasure, it was ultimately a bad idea. I was strong. Thing is, sometimes I do buy doughnuts.
• A group of nuns outside the church, and voices soaring from within. I like seeing nuns, or monks. I don’t know why. They are cheering I think. They are from another world, and they don’t seem real. And it’s like you’re playing a game of spotting things, and they are a notable kind of person, worth spotting, both unusual and distinctive.
• Clearly, when you go to get photos developed in Mexico and they say one hour, clearly they will not be done today, clearly you will have to come back tomorrow. I don’t mind at all, but I feel a fool for having lived here six months and gone back thinking they would be done. Latin time. Silly me.

Zzz

It’s no news to anyone, least of all me, that the timepiece my body clock most resembles is the berserk pocket watch in Alice in Wonderland that gets filled with butter and jam and hit with a hammer… but really, what the fuck is UP with it?

Every day, I am more tired: my muscles ache, I can’t concentrate, I’m desperate to sleep, I feel like a lead doll. Every evening I think, tonight I will DEFINITELY go to bed at a sensible time, and get at least 8 glorious hours’ sleep. Every night, I am somehow reading things on the internet, or trying to keep up my diary, or listening to BBC7, or sorting out washing, or just generally messing about and feeling awake until it’s far too late to get enough sleep, again. (Obviously I am not writing emails or doing other worthwhile and productive things, because although I am wakeful, I am terribly tired, and the minutes and hours trickle spitefully away.) And so it goes…

I can’t really claim insomnia… I have no problem sleeping, I just don’t seem to be able to accustom myself to doing it during normal night-time hours, no matter how tired I am. It’s getting ridiculous: last night I somehow didn’t go to sleep til nearly 4. And today I am overtired, overemotional and not entirely on the correct planet.

Oh well, tonight I will DEFINITELY go to bed at a sensible time…

I've never said no before

I just told my boss that, although I am very grateful to have been asked, I do not want to extend my contract for another year after October. I was quite unreasonably terrified (What do you mean say no? But I'm not worthy in the first place! They'll hate me...) but it was OK.

I'm glad I don't have to think about the decision any more, although I never really doubted what I wanted. There are wonderful things and there are miserable things about being here, and I don't regret coming for a moment, but regardless I feel like a migrant bird, feeling the call of a far away place in the tiny magnetic crystals in its cells. The very dust I am made of seems to feel the distance, and strain against it. Every day I think of coming home with more gladness.

whenever, wherever

Pretty much since I arrived in Mexico, and someone told me that Shakira had played here fairly recently, I have been hoping she’d come back while I am here and resolved to go and see her if so. I absolutely love Shakira, and how much more exciting to see her in a Latin country?

So… I have tickets to see Shakira in concert on the 13th of May! Wooooooooo!

When I found out (by chance) that she is playing here, I was ridiculously overexcited and went around smiling like a loon for a while, and going around looking for Shakira CDs and watching her videos online. The subsequent hassle (trying to work out how many tickets to buy with a number of people being vague, trying to buy tickets online and finding they didn’t take my card, making a special trip to the city, finding they no longer had the seats we wanted in a decent position, buying a phone card, calling a friend to discuss how many of the more expensive tickets to get, trying to buy tickets in a shop and ditto, finding a cash machine, realising I didn’t know the pin number of my new card, going back into the city the next day…) has slightly taken the shine off things, but I think (hope) it will come back. I also feel slightly guilty that this is the weekend that my mother is visiting, but, you know, it’s SHAKIRA!

My love of Shakira clearly makes me not at all cool (in the ‘alternative’, anti-cool sense… um, or in any sense). I have also recently (re)discovered my love of volleyball, which a bunch of us have started playing on Fridays. This is a sport I associate with cheerful, vapid, clean-livin’ types, and definitely not with the (anti-) cool kids who listen to sad music and wear black and look down on things. It is also the BEST fun.

I’m still enamoured of and intimidated by the anti-cool kids, and part of me wants to be like them, and has an unnatural love of armwarmers and other items of splendidly absurd teenage clothing, and feels defensive about all the uncool things I like… But mostly, one of the loveliest things about being… well, not grown up, but older, is being able to like lots of things and not having to worry about being anti-cool, or regular cool, or anything. I can like Shakira and volleyball and books and flying kites and black humour and ping-pong and grammar and intelligent conversation and odd details and dancing and sunsets and armwarmers and art and comic strips and folk and BBC radio and treasure hunts and sincerity and silliness and so much else and IT’S ALL JUST FINE, AND HURRAY! Which is just as well… figuring out who you are and what you want doesn’t seem to get any easier, so not having to try so hard to squeeze that into some notion of cool is a relief.

I went to another concert at the weekend (which if nothing else should boost my obscure-world-music-snobbery cool quotient): a free concert in the main square of Mexico City by Silvio Rodriguez, a famous (here) Cuban singer. His songs are beautiful: romantic, poetic ballads suffused with uncompromising left-wing politics (apparently—that’s a bit above my head in Spanish). I was very tired and a bit nervous about going on my own, and almost didn’t—I was in the car having decided to go back with the two colleagues I’d been spending the day with, when I told myself not to be so dull and spineless. And I’m glad I did. I’d guess there were thousands of people there, but it wasn’t packed – I guess the intermittent rain kept people away. The music was sad and uplifting. He played a song I knew and a song I immediately loved, and lots more lovely songs. I was reminded of Simon and Garfunkel a tiny bit, if they’d been Cuban. It was strangely peaceful, among the crowds and the magnified music that echoed off the buildings. People cheered when he began a song they loved and sang along, and closed their eyes, smiled, and held each other. I watched people, and the big screen by the stage, and the enormous Mexican flag that flies above the square, billowing with fantastic grace against the grey sky.

Great things I bought on Sunday: Shakira tickets; a Tracy Chapman CD; a ring in the shape of a rose; a hammock (lazy summer evenings, here I come).
Unbuyable: sunshine; the exuberant, cosmopolitan hustle-bustle of the city, street performers and kite-sellers; rain and a cool evening; beautiful music bathing a crowd; a flag flying.
Not bought: a military/revolutionary-style cap with ‘Silvio Rodriguez’ and the Cuban flag on the front. I can’t say it was taste that held me back (after all, I do love armwarmers), just self-consciousness that let the girls selling them disappear into the crowd.

mission accomplished

Ha, beastie safely recovered! I don't know what it is that makes hamsters unable to resist going into things like mugs, toilet roll tubes etc when placed in front of them, but it's jolly useful.

and it's not full moon or anything

Lucita is behind the bloody oven.

Hermione is doing her frantic hamster best to open the cage door and escape again.

Honestly, I don't remember slipping the crazy pills into their food. (I've been keeping those to myself...)

hunting

I am very tired, and trying to write a post about something else, but I am being sporadically distracted by looking for one of my hamsters.

I am now fairly convinced it is somewhere underneath/behind my kitchen cabinets, and I don't really feel I can go to bed until I've found it.

This would never have happened with kittens...

words of the weekend

heartache (me) (enough said, for now)

lambent (the sky)

boats (in) (also nostalgia invoked by, also desire for, plus river at the bottom of the garden)

Always different things

A vaguely depressing thing:
Enjoying the lovely brownness of your arms, then taking off your sunglasses and seeing what a horrible dirty white colour they are.

An uplifting thing:
Sunlight through the wings of a fluttering bird.

A cheering thing:
Two middle-aged men walking along with their arms around each other and laughing—not looking drunk, just happy.

An intriguing thing:
A man on the bus talking with someone over a radio that looked just like a swish mobile phone. I wonder if it was a radio dressed up as a phone to look cooler, or a phone with a built in radio—which would be kinda exciting, no? I always wanted a walkie talkie…

A good thing:
The clocks on summer time: warm, light evenings, and time to walk about the town in the light and appreciate things as I walk along.

A disgusting thing:
Lots of pieces of skin in buckets. Glistening in the sun.

A heartwrenching thing:
The tiny kittens I saw a few days ago—two Siamese, three black—still in the same cage in the same pet shop. Looking just the same—eyes as if it was a struggle to open them, moving in that unmistakable, uncertain baby way—only more bedraggled.
It’s weird, this being a grown up. That you could, just like that, do something drastic, foolish or bad for you, something with consequences, like buy kittens—and there would be no-one to stop you, no-one to tell you not to. In five minutes I could’ve been the owner of kittens (which I really, really want to be, one of each—except they seem too young to have been taken from their mother) and it would be my responsibility. It’s a really strange feeling, suddenly being aware that your hand is on the tiller, and it’s been there a long time without you really knowing it.

And so many more things, most of them photogenic. Now that I no longer have a highly-portable, discreet little camera, I see things I want to take pictures of everywhere I look. Never have I itched so much to take pictures, felt so visually inspired. Which would be fabulous, IF I had my bloody camera…

My new favourite shop

I had a proper crap day yesterday. One of the things about it was having to go out and do some shopping when I was dead tired and had a load of other things to be doing.

But this made me smile:
I got sucked into a little bootleg CD/DVD(/pizza – but I don’t think the pizzas are bootleg) store (shop, damnit, shop) that I must’ve walked past but haven’t been in before. Which sort of thing is why I have to go out again today, but I have a bit of a CD-buying problem. ’Svery compulsive.

I was just perusing one of the cardboard boxes of CDs when a man from the shop started shifting me and the table it was on over to one side, and I realised that someone was revving up his motorbike in the back room (not a delivery bike I think, just this guy’s bike). And he drove it through the shop, between the counter and all the CDs, and out the front door.

I love that this is normal and logical.

In the same shop, I joined their loyalty scheme. Which involves me having a handwritten number on a piece of luminous card (587), and the nice lady writing down all the things I buy in one of several tattered notebooks, and me getting free things if I buy lots of other things. I have a feeling it might just work on me…

An office interruption

I am in the bathroom (toilet, damnit… loo, bog, lavatory). I vaguely notice a loud noise.

I return to my office, and my computer is dead. Everyone else is sprouting out into the corridor too; clearly their computers are also dead.

“It sounded like something exploded,” says my boss. “I think the problem’s our UPS.”

“What’s a UPS?”

“An Uninterruptible Power Supply.”

Hee hee.