Aaaah. Mexico.

Back in Mexico. There's a smile in my Spanish when I speak here, a gentleness that overtakes me. Also, I have this heightened awareness of the absurd circumstance of being a gringa in Mexico. Mostly it feels like people regard me with a sort of bemusement, above all. Many are incredibly helpful; some seem to think that good luck rubs off of me like I'm a chimney-sweep or something; still others are just straight up curious about me. Two reporters chased me down yesterday to ask a foreigner how she celebrates Christmas, and seemed a bit disappointed when I answered that it's a time to practice a bit more good will, tolerance, patience and kindness toward others, hang out with your family, and eat. I guess my answer wasn't very exotic -- on the upside, I might wind up on the six o'clock news for all the right reasons!

Stop me if you've heard this one, or just indulge me instead: there's a game I like to play here an ex-pat friend of mine taught me. It consists, very simply, of spotting the incongruence. The theory is that, wherever you go in Mexico, at any given moment, there's something completely, totally, obviously out of place within your field of vision. A costume shop at the bus station. A truck driving along with its rear-view mirrors lit on fire in honor of the Virgen de Guadalupe. A man painted silver from head to toe. And if you can't find the incongruence, you're probably it.

Mexico assaults the senses. It's a loud, bumpy, spicy, bright place and it always smells like something, whether the sting of diesel exhaust, the heady fragrance of frying chiles, or the slightly ammoniac smell of fresh tortillas. Much of it is homely; some of it is sublimely beautiful, and it's all jumbled together: encimado, they'd say here. On-topped. You have to adjust your vision in order to shut out different kinds of noise, to become blind to different types of visual interference, in order to find the beauty. It takes practice, but when you manage it, you're richly rewarded.

It comes home with me, too, this gentleness. Greater openness to chance experiences and encounters. La entrega: a giving over. With it comes greater patience for unexpected setbacks, and renewed faith that things - all things - have a way of working themselves out. If your problem has a solution, a Mexican proverb says, why worry? And if your problem has no solution, why worry? If I'm mindful I can sustain this state of mind for a time. Three years away though...I was definitely due for a re-charge.

Retrospective

Okay, so it's been an obscenely long time since I posted here, and I'm now slinking back with my figurative tail between my legs thanks to the gentle exhortations of my new neighbor. I thought that for this first post in over a year, I'd bring things up to date by looking at my most recent (if that word even applies) posts with the perspective that a year or more provides. So here goes:

My university is small enough that word seems to have gotten out about me; either that or students are posting mad comments on ratemyprofessor.com; either that or I'm much more effectively conveying my indifference toward my students' hardships because the Lame Excuse Quotient has significantly dropped over the past six months or so.

My mojo and I are still largely estranged, although we have attempted reconciliation on a handful of frosty occasions, and we haven't given up on working things out.

Christmas Chimp passed from this life shortly after I wrote about him, and Hedgehog Version 7.0 reigns supreme over pantry and hallway. Grendl often disappears into the pantry and moans longingly for her while sticking his head out and shooting us pointed glances from under the pantry curtain (a pose which gives him a striking resemblance to Obi-Wan Kenobi).

I confirmed that it was indeed Rachael "Raykle" Ray who stole my stuffing recipe. Either that, or some time over the course of the last year or so I convinced myself that I confirmed this. I am indifferent to which of these things is true.

I still love Julie Andrews, Halloween, and my #1 pop song versions.

Grendl's dog park behavior became too humpalicious, alienating other dog park goers and supplanting his enjoyment of things like Running Around and Doing His Business, so we don't go there as often as we once did.

I have not found a satisfactory alternative to: Kleinstuck, Asylum woods, Martini's antipasto salad, Bluegrass Breakfast, the Heritage Company, Bank Street Market, my twenties.

As predicted by gretchencb, I have found a satisfactory alternative to: the Vine neighborhood, the Corner Bar.

As predicted by madamechuchita, I have not needed to find a satisfactory alternative to: Bell's Two-Hearted Ale. I have also attempted mastery of some of Just Good Food's recipes, to varying degrees of success.

I have found a whole new list of reasons to miss the 10th floor of Sprau Tower, as well as all its other floors, most of which have to do with my gratitude to the professors who didn't just provide me with an education, but also with some much-needed fetchin' up.

Also: the gentleman heretofore known as "the neighbs" is now, officially, "the hubs". And we're still dancing.

And Canada is still a magical place where sun shines out of everyone's ass; the perfect place, in fact, if not for the weather. Which is terrible for, like, half the year.

my own private internet

So, perhaps this isn't the most propitious topic with which to reappear on the blogosphere after a prolonged absence, but today I want to communicate one simple message:

I hereby reclaim the right to determine the extent and the nature of my relationship with social networking technologies.

This comes after months of being inundated with text messages, upbraided for not updating my facebook page, and chastised for not twittering. With regard to this last, I will only say that as far as I'm concerned the name speaks for itself. I have spent years trying to surround myself with interesting and thoughtful people and thereby reduce the amount of "twitter" in my life. The other two points, I'd like to discuss in greater detail.

First off, is it okay if I just call you up on the telephone, the old-fashioned way? In this manner, I can hear your voice, your inflection, your pauses, your context - in short, all those extralinguistic cues that help me navigate within our conversation and make our exchange pleasant and rewarding. I have perpetual thumb cramp from trying to keep up with my friends, who evidently all sport mini-QWERTY's on their phones, while I hunt and peck through my traditional ten digits and the predictive text feature on my humble Samsung reveals, yet again, that its vocabulary is far inferior to my own. I think a reasonable rule of thumb, so to speak, would be that if you have more than two questions to ask me upon whose answer the direction of our conversation is contingent, call me. This will save me twenty cents, and potentially carpal tunnel syndrome, and last I checked is still the quickest and most efficient means for two people to exchange information.

Secondly: just because I am on facebook, this does not mean that I am obligated to give you a detailed report of my activities on a daily basis, nor that I should be expected to know everything about you all the time. In fact, it would be nearly impossible for me to know everything about you all the time, given that I would likely have to spend the bulk of my day slogging through everything about all 150 of my friends all the time in order to keep up. Seriously, if I call you up and say "well hello there, friend, how was your day?", are you really going to say "well, I woke up, and it was nice out, so I was happy, but then I was hungry, so I had some breakfast, and then I wasn't hungry anymore, so I decided to get ready for work but the shower was cold, so I was annoyed, and then..."? I think you are a sensible enough person to summarize and edit the minutiae of your day before talking to me, and that this has a lot to do with why we are friends in the above scenario, so why in God's name does this seem like an appropriate facebook status update? Considering the way some people appear to be using facebook, it's a wonder that anyone's status is ever anything other than "drowning in other people's facebook status updates".

I guess my point is that just because I'm not that up on my social networking doesn't mean that I'm a snob or a bad person or antisocial or that I don't like you anymore. Not so very long ago, if memory serves, technology was just one means of facilitating communication between folks. No one thought less of you or laid a big guilt trip on you if you only turned up on MSN Messenger a couple of times a month. Now, suddenly, we seem to have forgotten that the beauty of social networking technology is its versatility: people are free to engage with it however they want, however frequently or seldom they wish, and whenever they choose.

Got a problem with that? I'll be home in an hour or two. Come knock on my door, I'll brew you a cup of coffee, and we can talk about it. Face to face.

enough

Dear students,

News flash: I don't care why you didn't come to class yesterday, or the day before, or the day before, unless you have a doctor's note you'd like me to use to excuse your absences. I don't care about whatever technological melt-down prevented you from turning in your homework. I don't care how sick your roommate's cousin's cat is. All I care about is that you a.) show up, b.) do the work, and c.) don't waste my time on some elaborate excuse as to why you failed to do a.) or b.). It's embarrassing for both of us.

Even saying that I care about a.), b.) and c.) would be overstating things. Really, all I care about is c.). It really doesn't affect me one way or the other if you fail my class, unless it's due to me not holding up my end of the educational bargain. Since I know that this is not the case, I'm just not losing sleep over it. My job is to provide you with resources and opportunities that will facilitate your learning. Your job is to avail yourself of those resources and opportunities. At most, your failure to do your job inconveniences me in the extent to which it infringes upon the time and energy I should be devoting to doing my job (hint: the less infringement here, the better).

It may come as a surprise to you that my personal opinion of you has nothing to do with the grade you will receive, and as a consequence your reason for dropping the ball will have little bearing on the outcome. Unless you can prove to me that the fates have aligned against you - which happens to us all at times - your reasons for dropping the ball or how nice a person you are will, in fact, have no bearing whatsoever on the grade I give you. If you choose to try to prove to me that the fates have aligned against you, you better be ready to bring it.

Student A: I'm sorry your boyfriend is in the hospital. But Jason so-and-so could be your eighth cousin twice removed as far as I know, and even if I accept that he is, in fact, your boyfriend, I fail to see how his emergency room visit last week should excuse your absences for roughly half the semester.

Student B: I can't figure out how the university's network could so maliciously hide the two web-based assignments you swear you did (out of the four I assigned), considering that I can see all the work that everyone else did without a single problem. Don't think that the growing complexity of your excuse (you can see it when you log in, etc.) will prevent me from frog-marching you down to the computer lab to show me what the network evidently can't. Tell me, exactly how far would you like to take this?

Student C: You were notified of today's assignment two weeks ago, during two consecutive class periods of which you attended neither. When you attempted to find an online copy so that you could start the work this afternoon before class, you learned there wasn't any. Moreover, I failed to bring hard copies of the assignment I administered fully two weeks ago and, since I had heard nothing to the contrary until today, THE DUE DATE, assumed you knew about. You have five classes. I have nearly a hundred students. At any given moment, a dozen or so of these students have some contingency going on (some legitimate, others not at all) that desperately needs my special consideration. Tell me, whose job do you think it is to make sure you know what's going on?

I will not claim to be the world's most organized and responsible person. Far from it. Nonetheless, it is now my job to instill in you all a spirit of accountability for your own actions, and this is one responsibility I take very seriously.

Whatever you think, it's not me you're mad at right now.

have you seen me?

Lost: mojo.

Missing since: Beginning of second semester as a college professor.

Description: shimmering, mercurial, brilliant blue, shape-shifting veil of creativity and energy.

Last seen with: Girlish Laughter, Sense of Purpose, Childlike Wonder.

Also answers to: juju, pilas, chutzpah, moxie.

Reward: back handspring, Great American Novel.

If found, please: just send smoke signals or leave it in a basket on the front stoop, or else slip it quietly back into its place and I'll never know you're the one who took it.

projects, fall 2008

Here are some projects that I've been meaning to post about for a while now. Namely, since the fall. I won't even start on the winter ones in this round. Suffice it to say, I've been busy.

These were felted wool and corduroy masks for a Halloween masquerade street fair in our neighborhood. Too bad everybody was passed out by the time we hit the streets.

Everybody told me I should just give up on this metal cabinet. I admit, it was more shabby than chic, and it got old having to vacuum up the paint chips once a week. Instead, I took some steel wool and WD-40 to it and stripped it down to this:
Next, I spray-painted it with Rustoleum to try to contain the creeping rust, then applied dark brown paint, then a crackle glaze, and finally an apple green paint. Maybe my friends were right and I should have left well enough alone, but I'm happy with the results:

I found this telescoping table at a garage sale. It looks like an innocent buffet here, but it seats fifteen people when you put the leaves in. Perfect when you have no idea whether your next place is going to have a dining room, but definitely needed some touching up.

This is after stripping it and refinishing with a cherry gel stain (additional cherry artwork courtesy of Nohemí Lugo, table runner by yours truly):Andy had this dresser with the paper-thin oak veneer finish and colonial-ish hardware:
and he kindly let me paint it and replace the hardware. The table runner, I made a couple years back:

This was the bike I got when I was twelve. Back when a rainbow pastel bike was a hot item. The best bike I've ever had, but definitely needed some updates.

Again, WD-40 and a green kitchen scrubbie took the rust out of the chrome.Emory bikes were handmade in Jacksonville, Florida. Some time soon I'll go back and spraypaint a bit more carefully around the emblem.

The handlebars were covered in this crappy black foam, which we peeled off to reveal pristine chrome. Since this photo, it's had new whitewalls, a new chain, and new grips (not pink). Phase three starts in the spring: fenders, a basket, and a new seat, and it'll be a bona fide cruiser.So there you go. Stay tuned for winter's projects.

This one's for Sarah Vowell.

What do the commander of the Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee, intrepid Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and the father of the Civil Rights movement the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. all have in common?

Up until recently, all three were commemorated in the Commonwealth of Virginia on the same Friday each January, a holiday called Lee-Jackson-King Day.  

This is actually somewhat more innocuous than it sounds.  Virginia had already been celebrating King's birthday since 1978 (although it's worth mentioning that he had to share the marquee with New Year's Day...ringing in the new year being a pretty tough act to follow, of course).  Then, Ronald Reagan declared Martin Luther King Jr. Day a national celebration in 1983.  Unfortunately, this coincided with a day that Virginia had already set aside to celebrate its local heroes, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.  

Aw, what the hell, decided Virginia.  If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I reckon.  Somehow, celebrating the dogged defenders of one human being's right to possess another human  being while simultaneously celebrating the man who had a dream that one day this nation would rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed seemed tenable here in the state that boasts the former capitol of the Confederacy.  What's most amazing to me as a damn Yankee is that this seemed okay all the way from 1983 up until 2000, when the governor of the Commonwealth, Jim Gilmore, suggested that Virginia go ahead and observe the same Federal holiday as everybody else, and celebrate their Confederate darlings on the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day instead.  

Everybody wins!

And for dessert, I offer you this one: a week ago today, the public schools in the Hampton Roads area all closed, along with most of the universities (except, as luck would have it, mine) due to a winter weather advisory predicting - are you ready for this? - one to five inches of snow.  The punchline for this Michigander is that this had all been accomplished before a single snowflake had been spotted on or anywhere approaching the ground in all of Hampton Roads.  So, as the ticker across the bottom of the screen was scrolling through every school district for miles around, the meteorologist was saying "well, we haven't seen any snow yet, of course, bu-ut..." In fact, all of the ominous predictions would amount to no snowfall whatsoever, just a snow day.   

Yep, Toto.  Definitely not Kansas.