Yo sigo aqui...

I woke up on Friday with a swollen cheek and a pain pin-pointed at three places along my jaw. A nagging feeling had begun the day before while wandering around La Condesa with friends so I gargled some hydroxide and drank two-for-one beers at a near-by bar and quickly forgot about it.

My first instinct is always to self-medicate, provide instant relief, and take care of the problem later. I was nearly thrown into the hospital when I came back from South Africa because I had been traveling for weeks with two torn-up and infected feet. Hah. During that appointment my doctor claimed that all young adults think they're invincible and I guess sometimes I'm no exception.

Anyway, once again I basically ignored the pain because I figured it was my wisdom tooth and the area just needed to be flushed out. I went out that night, slept out, and arrived back at my place the next afternoon after falling asleep on the bus and missing my stop by probably 20 minutes.

Fortunately my roommate is friends with a dentist and set me up with an appointment later on in the day. Needless to say that the root of my problems, as the dentist explained at his office, were essentially my own fault for not properly taking care of my teeth. The area around my wisdom tooth had become infected again and I had massive plaque build-up and so on and so on. I was there for a few hours and he cleaned up my teeth and pulled the wisdom tooth. It turned out that the tooth actually had three roots and one was scrapping again my jaw.

I've always had teeth issues since before I even had any. Around the time a baby would be growing in a first set of teeth I was not cooperating. So they pumped me up with calcium injections and I grew so many so fast that I have a double-tooth on the top and some crowding on the bottom. I never got braces and never felt the need to. I already needed modern science to over-come my heart condition and metal bars in my mouth seemed unnecessary. It seemed superficial to me.

Anyway, the whole thing came out to be a fraction of the price of what it would have been at home. The guy was cool too and we actually went to lunch before he took my tooth out.

I kept the thing and I want to bury it somewhere in Mexico, somewhere I fall in love with.

***

I've been having a good time with the people around me which is calming my anxiety about the expectations put on me by my department back at school and my professors. I am expected to do a project while I'm down here but I'm not so confident in my abilities to follow through. My professor and thesis adviser is down here for a week. He's assuaged some of my concerns but I'm still nervous. I'm not the type to worry about academics or grades but I am being expected to do something I was never too sure about from the beginning...

***

Since Friday I've been recovering, eating mostly fruit in the form of baby mush and ice cream. I took some pictures of my quirky little apartment today instead of going to school and I've been keeping up on the political bullshit back home.

***

The NYTimes has a great photo essay on Namibia in the travel section of their website. It captures the country pretty well from a tourist's point of view.

Here it is.

I remember sitting in the middle of the shallowest part of the Orange River which separates Namibia and South Africa one night when the overland tour I was part of set up camp. The sun setting behind the mountains was stunning and I felt little fish biting my feet and fingers. There I thought that one riverside looked exactly like the other and that the river was only a border assigned on a map and that it couldn't prevent me from swimming across. So I did and then we all did.

All of us on the tour, we stripped naked and swam across.

***

For the free-flow of ideas and the free-flow of people, I want to walk past the make-believe lines of the Americas, the fortified borders, and barbed-wire fences because I know that a red line on a map is bullshit and all the terrain is the same.

El extranjero

According to my roommate, Acapulco used to be a happening place in the 70s and 80s, a rare resort town that retained at least some of its Mexican identity.

My parents went there for their honeymoon over 26 years ago and I have a vague memory of chasing a peacock in a plaza when my family vacationed there when I was very little.

Most tourists fly into Acapulco, bypassing the north of Mexico. The same goes for Cancun. Now, these places have become a haven for well-off northerners looking for a good time and cheap drinks. Acapulco, in that sense, doesn't disappoint.

This past weekend I ventured down to the famous hot spot with some friends for a much needed break from the D.F. The water was warm and the drinks were cold and we had ourselves a great time lounging on the beach and sipping tequila and spritz. The whole town would be absolutely breath-taking if all the sand weren't stolen and sold to hotel chains and foreigners. Styrafoam and shit is swept away into the sea every evening at high tide.

We took an organized tour around the bay and onto an island on the second day and as the commercial boat sped along through the turquoise water contaminated with trash, I hung off the edge, thinking back to a few remote days on Zanzibar in the middle of my African explorations.

***

One day Cholo, a local ship builder, invited me along with his crew to run some errands around the island. I'm not a strong swimmer and I know nothing about shipbuilding but for that day, and the following when Cholo explained and showcased all the styles of ships that were used on the island, I wanted to drop out of school and join his crew. I wanted to trade with the local Muslim tribes and strap giant logs to the side of a trim ship and live and work according to the tides and the rains.

But there I, as I am here and everywhere else in the world, am a foreigner.
I am restless and rootless. The latter feeds the former and the former feeds the latter.

***

Due to the negligence of my University here, there's a chance my student visa may get denied and I won't be able to finish out the semester. A part of me wishes that would happen so I have an excuse to skip town and head south...

Vagando por la vida...

Since 2006 I have begun to all but completely phase out my life on Long Island, in New York, and in the U.S. in general.

In a not-so-subtle attempt to escape, I fled to Mexico City under the auspices of a study abroad program at an extravagant university centered in the coldest appendage of an over-extended monstrosity of a city. Sante Fe, the former garbage dump of the D.F., shines with all its sharp steel and soul-less skyscrapers.

I have been here for less than four weeks and already I feel consumed like each little town that once lay in this city's shadow but has since been swallowed up by it.

For the record I am enjoying myself here. I have a room and a mattress. A neighborhood, a house-mate, and a cat. The cat is never satisfied and I struggle every day not to give it a little kick to shut it up. I have waged chemical warfare against the mosquitoes at night. I have met good people. Cute people.

I ride the public bus every morning into school for two pesos even though for maybe two or three more I could get there faster and more comfortably. I make up for my lack of language skills by trying my best to live like a local. I eat on the street and dump salsa picante all over my food at the risk of ruining my meal. My heart skips a beat when locals mistake me for Mexican, though I'm instantly reminded that I am but another gringo down south when I stutter to respond or stare blankly, lost in my own incomprehension...

***

So, for now, this blog will be a sort of outlet for my wandering mind while my feet remain planted here in Mexico City.

I hope I can get over myself enough to make some mistakes.

I want to come out of this scarred and scathed.