Days I can count

Just now, preparing to leave my office after a spectacularly unproductive few hours, I realised how much I have to do before I leave work - and leave Mexico. Now, helpfully, midnight approaches and I am rigid with panic and wideawake terror and torturous self-reproach.

So, here are my lists.

Before I leave Mexico, I will:

1) Somehow, do a mountain of work things. Thinking about this makes me want to cry.
2) Stop being a baby and sit down and sort out my finances. Pretty damn soon, so I can make sure I get all the money I'm supposed to.
3) Get my useless arse in gear and send pictures and thankyous to all the people I have interviewed and photographed so far. Write a few emails to try to set up a few trips, meetings and things (sorry, that's horribly vague, but it's either that or horribly convoluted).
4) Go some interesting places and do some research for my 'book'.
5) Take lots of pictures of the ordinary details of the place where I live.
6) Go dancing.
7) Figure out how to ship my stuff home for less than my entire overdraft limit. Not all of it, obviously. Not tins of beans, sheets, my cheese grater, clothes with holes in, my mattress. But books, clothes without holes in, beloved blankets, my cardboard skeleton Zorro, my favourite saucepan with the flowers on, more books.
8) Look for jobs. Spend hours applying for jobs. Try not to lose the will to live when they don't even get back to me.
9) Beat my friend Jose Juan to 15 points at table tennis when he is neither ill nor letting me win. Just once.
10) Sort out a fraction of the crap that I need to sort out. Papers, thoughts, plans, photographs, unwritten emails, unsent post... you name it. Be judicious in not having random panics and spending hours trying to sort out the things that don't absolutely need sorting out before I go.
11) Finish painting a tree of life that I happen to be painting, on a someone's wall.
12) Figure out my friendship with the Boy, somehow make it something I am happy about, something that won't fade away, and not fuck it up.
13) Keep on functioning: buying food, washing up, cleaning my house (well, at least once), going to the laundry, going back to the laundry when they deign to be open, please please being in just sometimes when the binmen pass, not falling completely to pieces.

I will not:

1) Piss about on the internet wasting my fucking life.
2) Stay up ridiculously late and sleep the day away. Or have to get up and work, and waste the day feeling like death on a stick.
3) Stay at home doing nothing and feeling fuzzy and absent.
4) Let whole working days slip by without achieving anything.
5) Listen to detective stories or comedy or anything else on BBC7, no matter how comforting it is. I have heard them all BEFORE, for fucksake.
6) Accept invitations to do social things out of a feeling that I ought to be sociable, especially if they are in the middle of the day and will therefore eat the whole thing, or if they will go on very late - see (2). Unless I really want to.
7) Read anything not relevant to my 'book', especially fiction. I have a self-control problem with fiction: if I start, I can't stop until I finish. No matter the quality of the book or the hour of the morning - see (2).
8) In summary - waste any more of my precious time.

It is too late to:
1) Keep a diary.
2) Be a good blogger and write more about Mexico - both the little things that make me smile and all the dirty-faced glory of this mad, marvellous place.
As a result of (1) and (2), I've forgotten so much almost instantly, and there's more I'll forget - odd things I've seen, people I've passed in the street, the particular way things happen to be that seem ordinary now. Moulded jellies sold from little class cases on wheels. Painted shop-fronts. The goths selling waxed roses in every colour you could wish for, especially black. The jingle on the radio for the talent spot, with the man who can tell how many letters in any sentence. The midget in the metro station in cowboy hat and cream suit, who is apparently a TV star.
3) Make Mexican friends outside work. (I have one.)
4) Be bohemian and meet all kinds of interesting and intellectual and extraordinary Mexicans, and hang out and learn things and have adventures unimagined.
5) Read some of my bookshelful of books about Mexico, and be less ignorant while I actually live here.
6) Make more of an effort with my Spanish and get better than it is.
7) Go at all to all kinds of fascinating and beautiful and beautifully ordinary places.
8) Go back to lots of other fascinating and beautiful and beautifully ordinary places.

For some of these I console myself by telling myself that I will be back. For some there is no consolation.