Of Heathens And Ponies

Look, atheists aren't devil worshipers. That's the whole point - we don't have religion, godly, satanic or otherwise. If I had a peso for every person who doesn't get this, well, I could buy myself that pony I've been waiting for.

I found myself suddenly in a conversation about religion the other day. My sister-in-law is Catholic and her boyfriend is Southern Baptist (I think) (and, no, he's not Mexican). We weren't talking about the beliefs of any of us, but rather about the variety of Christians who had just entered my mother-in-law's shop and surprised us all by hugging my (Catholic) mother-in-law and bringing evil out of her forehead? I think that's what was happening. We were all a little surprised, not least of all my mother-in-law.

A few minutes later I found my sister-in-law explaining how she knows a man who isn't religious and yet (this was her point) he's actually a very nice man.

. . .

I decided to remind her that most atheists are indeed good, kind, compassionate and decent human beings. As a lot, we're probably neither better nor worse than any group of believers. I then further reminded her that both her brother and I are atheists.

"I know," and then she repeated, "but this guy is actually a good man, with morals" and her eyes got really big to express the shock of it "even though he doesn't believe in God!"

Oh well. I guess I should go pick out a bridle.

Hippie Gerber

A cousin brought her baby by the house yesterday. The baby is about five months old, two months younger than Hanix. This baby was dressed like a little man: shirt tucked in, jeans, shiny black belt, boots. Hanix, on the other hand, sports robots on his cotton onesies, stripes on his pants, and it's a rare moment you'll find him shod. For this, naturally, everyone think I'm nuts. Totally insane. Child Endangerer. Total strangers regularly remark on his poor, shoeless feet. "How will he ever learn to walk!?" This is sheer nuttery to me, but I let it go. I'm over trying to explain that he'll learn to walk with or without shoes, and I know I seem equally ridiculous to them. I commented to Hernan that I thought a belt on a baby looked pretty silly, and he explained, "Yeah, well, Hanix doesn't wear belts because he's a hippie."

I'm surprised that so many people down here openly prefer light skin to dark. They call their kids prieto and negro feo. They are also pleased that Hanix was born rather fair. They call him güero, rubio, and gringito. Their favorite nickname, though, is Gerber. They swear he looks JUST like the Gerber baby, being fat and white and sort of baldish. I know a heap of fat, white, bald people. Not all of them look like the Gerber baby. Apparently Hanix is the spittin image.

So now you know how the San Juanecos refer to my baby. Hippie Gerber.

Death Comes Calling

Hernan and I were chatting about death last night and how we'd really very much not like to die any time soon, you know, if given a choice in the matter. It seems Death has come to take care of a backlog here in San Juan. Hernan knows fifteen or more people who have died just this month here in town. Seven were close friends of the family or relatives. The others were not as close, but were still connected to us in the many ways everyone in town seems connected to us. The neighbor who always sold fish and is the father of Hernan's buddy's sister-in-law. The former school teacher. His father's close friend. His cousin's uncle. The man who worked for decades alongside the family growing squash at the ranch. His friends' father. The father of his uncle's wife. His brother's friend. Two of Hernan's clients are very ill. His father didn't come home yesterday, so we can assume he's on another drinking binge. Those usually last about two weeks.

Praise the chubby, happy baby who makes it all easier to handle.

English Lessons

I’m punctual. If it appears I will arrive even a minute late I get nervous and grumpy and am likely to sprint ten city blocks to make it on time. If I’m too early, I’m liable to lurk somewhere nearby, in hiding, so that I can then appear just as the minute hand signals the appointed hour. I’m also very much a “man of his word”, minus the man part. That whole, “my word is my bond” “only as good as his word” business, unfortunately I take all that seriously. “So,” you might ask, “how’s living in Mexico working out for you then?” And then we all have a good laugh.

Slowly, I do think this whole “Mexican lifestyle thing” is chipping away at my neuroticism, but only slowly.

So when I agreed to teach a group of eight boys English lessons, I did know better. I knew that "I'll definitely come tomorrow" does not in any way mean that the speaker will come tomorrow. I won't call it lying, because I'm convinced Mexicans don't consider it lying. But there's a custom of assuring people of something that they know is not true. I accept it as a cultural difference, but even after all this time it can still drive me nuts.

"I'll definitely come by this afternoon."
"Yes, you can borrow my tools."
"Of course we'll be at your wedding. See you there!"

Sometimes these phrases mean what they appear to mean, but sometimes they mean something more like "I'm saying what I think you want to hear even though I have no intention whatsoever of coming over today/lending you my tools/attending your wedding."

This is nothing new, so I can't say it was a surprise that the eight boys, friends of my teenage brother-in-law, after convincing me to start group English classes, after negotiating the price and the time and the days, would just not show up. They probably did think they would come, but this is Mexico, and saying that you'll be somewhere at a certain time in no way means you'll be at said place at said time, or ever, for that matter.

Monday, three of the boys did actually show up, which surprised Hernan. They came twenty minutes late, but if they had shown up on time I wouldn’t have been ready, because Hernan wasn’t home yet to watch Hanix, even though he promised to be home an hour earlier. See, Hernan is Mexican too.

And Tuesday and Wednesday no one showed.

Where I get caught is that I keep running into these guys during the day, and they tell me over and over again “Tonight! We’ll be there!” and “Seven o’clock, right? I’ll see you then!” And then no one shows. I can’t say I don’t know better, but I am who I am, and if you tell me you’re coming at seven I’ll be running around at six thirty making sure the house is clean and I’ve got snacks ready and Hanix is fed and diapered and asleep. Basically, I’m neurotic and crazy and uptight and not yet operating on Mexican Time.


Just now on the street one of the guys passed me in a truck and shouted as he drove by “I’ll see you tonight, Teach!”

Oh well. That's Mexico.

Speaking of Tongues

I posted some time ago about the mamey fruit. Today I'm pleased to discover that mamey can also mean muscled out or oral sex. Thanks Effective Swearing.

Anyone have a good idea how much slang and swearing differ between D.F. and Guadalajara? Hernan's taught me pretty well to have a Spanish potty mouth, but he won't like it if I start sounding like a chilanga.

Bro-In-Law Turns 17

Fourteen teenage boys, one teenage girl, an eight-year-old boy, three cakes and a vat of hot chocolate. Who wants to put me up for the night?

Festivities in Jocotepec

The annual festivities are taking place in Jocotepec this week. We managed to make it out Friday night for the big night - Banda San Miguel and Banda El Pueblito were performing, as well as a chick band from GDL, which I didn't catch the name of (but the tuba player was pretty fly). Though banda music is not really my "thing", I admit that the groups were pretty tight and dancing was fun. Plus, who can resist twenty some dudes in matching suits, white boots, and a plus-sized tuba?

Go ahead, just try to resist.

So we left the Goblin King home with grandma and enjoyed the good times to be had at the festivities: street food, tequila mixed with Squirt, and dancing.

Jocotepec is a lot more cowboy than San Juan, so the tight jeans, cowboy hats, mustaches, and belt buckles the size of kittens were out in full force. By local standards, we're experiencing arctic temperatures, so nearly everyone was also sporting winter coats, gloves, scarves, and ski caps. (If we ever make it back to the States we're guaranteed to be total pussies, and your mockery will be anticipated.)

Groups of men stood around passing bottles of tequila back and forth, and for those who didn't think to BYOT, cantaritos were for sale everywhere. Couples danced. Babies slept in strollers. People huddled under their zarapes and exclaimed that they might die of the cold.

The local report is that Jocotepec (cowboys) doesn't like San Juan (squash growers), and that the cowboys go to the festivities packing. San Juan folk warned me multiple times to dive under a car or around a building if I heard gun shots, but nothing of the sort occurred. Of course there were fist fights, but none of them involved us.

Good times in Jocotepec.

The Best Cheese Man Ever

It would seem that my happiness can almost be guaranteed by the simple combination of two great things: free and food.

Yes, "free" plus "food" equals "happy" about ninety percent of the time.

This is why my Thursdays are always filled with a trip to The Best Cheese Man Ever in Jocotepec's weekly market.

I like to consider The Best Cheese Man Ever to be my friend, even though we know one another not at all. He recognizes me as "La Güerita" with the baby, and plies me with many generous free samples. I buy about five kilos worth of cheese and yogurt, and sometimes pan dulce or chorizo. He cuts me a good deal and always throws in a little extra of something, and he's not the least bit smarmy about it. My Thursday afternoons are then spent eating cheese.

What's not excellent about that?

So if you're in the hood, go to the Jocotepec tianguis, he's the first (not the second) cheese man on the left when coming from the plaza. You'll know him because his yogurt is in bags while The Other Cheese Man sells his in plastic tubs. Also, you'll soon be handed all manner of dairy delights within moments of stopping in front of his table. He's The Best Cheese Man Ever, what more can I say?

Old Lady Me

It turns out that I'm a lot older than I knew. I thought I was still young, but it would seem I am decidedly not.

This epiphany struck tonight while I was giving my teenage bro-in-law his second English lesson.

He's a cool kid, so teaching him English is kind of fun, and it also means I have someone to talk to. And let's face it folks, I get lonely talking to my blog all the time. Hanix is still a lousy conversationalist (though he's mastered the razz pretty well), and Hernan is just not around much of the time (apparently he forgot how exciting and cool I am). So English classes it is!

Hanging out with a seventeen-year-old, though, has made it clear just how not young I am. Ah, San Juan! Where it's normal to be married and babied by 18 (if not 15) and old-lady-me is positively not in with the in crowd.

But this I'd already figured out. What drove it home was every pop culture reference I tried to use to get kid brother to remember the words I'm teaching him. They all fell flat.

Here are some examples:

"Bad": I start singing Michael Jackson's "Bad". Blank stare.
"Forest": I say "Run, Forrest, Run!". No clue. I admit, a poor attempt.
"Y" (the letter): I (of course) start singing and dancing "Y-M-C-A". Crickets.

The list goes on. Tonight involved a lot of me singing and him staring. Maybe not so helpful, then.

In a related story, nobody here seems to have ever heard of David Bowie. I'm not exactly a Bowie fan, but I thought he was famous enough to have made it to Mexico. Even my thirty-something sis-in-law doesn't know him, so I guess not everything can be attributed to generational differences and my ancient-ness.

Anyway, holy shitballs I gotta get back to the Bay. Before I break a hip!

¡Cállate!

Word is that my 7 month old niece has said made her first Spanish utterance. I'm skeptical, but everyone assures me it's true.

What is this first utterance?

¡Cállate!

Shut up.

This is funny, but makes a person wonder how often she had to hear that for it to be the first thing she learned to say?

Her next word will probably be pendejo.

Cats Looking For Sex

This last week we've been graced with a new obnoxious nocturnal sound. I'm used to the highway traffic, the roosters, the yelling, the beer store music, the banda next door, the dog fights, the bottle breaking and, yes, even the fireworks. I barely notice them anymore. Now we've got a new one: cats in heat.

Rrrrooooooooowwwwrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

The cats probably belong to Hernan's aunt who lives next door.

This morning my mother-in-law asked how I slept.

"Terribly" I said.

"Because of the cats?"

"No, because my baby is the sleepless wonder." (And for those of you impressed that I can say "sleepless wonder" in Spanish, I can't actually. Let's call this a "loose" translation.)

"Oh. Well those cats kept me up."

"It's because they're in heat, right?" (And since I don't know how to say "in heat" I said something more like, "looking for sex". Ha!)

"No. It's because they're hungry."

...? Really? You think that... oh! OH!......!

"Yes. They're hungry." Mother-in-law smiles at me. "I think I'll put some food out for them."

...

So, yeah, I'm pretty sure my mother-in-law is going to poison our neighbors' cats.


It won't be the first time.

Baby's Buff

My baby's gunna be ripped as soon as he loses that beer gut. We discovered today that he can do situps. If he's lying down and someone holds his feet, he just sits right up. Nothing to it. Like a buoy. Pop! He's sitting up now. Grinning. And screeching like a raptor. That's my boy! Ripped, grinning raptor child.

Familia De Nueve

Now that my sis-in-law and her son moved in with us, we're nine here in the house. Me, Hanix, Hernan, his mother, father, grandmother, teenage brother, sister, and nephew. Four generations. That's a baby, a kid, a teenager, a twenty-something, two thirty-somethings, a fifty-something, sixty-something, and ninety-something. Sounds like a great idea for show, right?

Familia de Diez


Does this make me the blonde daughter-in-law?

Almost Super Dad

I put Hanix down to sleep every night. The beautiful part here is that I get to lie down too. And sometimes I fall asleep first, but no one knows if I drift off for a few minutes. (Except when a few minutes turns into an hour and then I completely fail to reappear for new year's eve midnight rituals because I'm "still putting him to ssszzzzz..." Yes, I'm boring. This I know.) But the not beautiful part is that it's always on me, and I could use a break once in a while.

So my point is that I'm lazy and tired and boring. Wait, that's a lame point. Uh, my point is that I put Hanix to sleep every night. But tonight I did not! (Not this time, anyway, he'll be up in two hours, and then every hour until morning...) Hernan finally stepped up and did it himself.

This, you might think, is a boring thing to post about, and you would be right, except that you're wrong. This is HUGE! This is GREAT! This is an event that warrants capital letters and exclamation points!

Hernan is rarely even around until after nine, and then doesn't usually help out much. In the past I've tried putting the task on him, but all that happened was he worked Hanix up into screams and tears and then handed him back to me saying "Can you give him some tittie", which kind of made me mad, but also laugh because it's just such a ridiculous thing to say. And since I hate hearing Hanix cry, I always took over.

But TONIGHT, most beautiful of all nights, I was busy teaching my brother-in-law English, which we're maybe going to start doing every night (we'll see), and Hernan really wanted to leave to go play pool and drink beer with his boyfriend, so he was motivated. And he did it! Bazam!

I try to understand that Hernan's come a long way from what he grew up with in terms of fatherhood. His father changed but one diaper in his life, while his wife was in labor with child two, and it involved the bedsheets and a whole lot of cursing, and his mother-in-law finished the job. I could write a hundred pages on what I think about machismo and parenting and housework and Mexican men who live with their mothers and his sneaky ways to get me to do his laundry for him and how hard women work and blah-de-blah, but I'm too lazy and tired and boring for that, so I'll just leave off here.

Still, this is huge. See... if he did it once he can do it again. This frees me up so that I can do other things, like the dishes go out and party with my many interesting friends.

Get It Together, 2010

It's been a pretty bum year so far. Just after midnight an acquaintance of my husband nearly crashed into him and our visiting friend and then did crash into a van outside of our house. Hernan had to play peacemaker between the van owner and the drunk driver. Another drunk driver hit a kid on one of the roads nearby. The kid is alive, though in the hospital. And the next morning we found out that one of my brother-in-law's friends, a 19 year old kid, died of heart failure (drinking and maybe drugs were involved). So Hernan has now buried two people with his shovel, the kid and his friends' dad. In other cheery news, my sister-in-law and her son had their visas revoked at the US border and have now moved in with us and the rest of the fam. And Hanix seems to have caught his cousin's cough.

In happier news, a friend visited for the last week of December, and left us all in good spirits (can't ya tell?) and also I took a nap yesterday and that was pretty terrific.

Happy new year, y'all.