Well! I just had an awesome mini-vacation with my dad! We didn't do anything particularly interesting or anything, but it was still great. I have found that when I spend time with my family, especially with my parents but of course my brothers too, it has a way of making everything in my life seem so inconsequential, because everything is overshadowed by the love I feel for them and also my desperation to make them happy.
There are things I am not able to write well about. The problem is that they are things that I think about so much, to such overwhelming degrees of obsessiveness and detail and just plain time, that I could never render them down to the "right" level of simplicity. Probably one of these is my feelings for my family, and another one is my frustration with love.
Yes, love, which I have been thinking about a lot lately for a few obvious reasons (it was Valentine's Day, I am kind of lonely, my last relationship fucked me up, so on), is a strange thing. I have, probably like most people, worked myself into the situation of never wanting to love someone again, not really, anyway, because it just seems like too much trouble. (This is such a lofty and vastly untrue statement. Let's just work with it, though, for the purposes of this paragraph.) Even on my good days (which are many--let's face it, I am exceedingly lucky, even if I have never won anything that didn't require some work on my part), I sometimes think a little bit about the way things ended up and it grosses me out. I wish I could be like other people, who pretend there is no past and just look forward, but I cannot shake myself out of the question, "who are we if not the things we have loved and the things we have fought for?" The problem is that from there it's only a skip and a jump to wondering why someone wouldn't just honestly telling you that they will not be fighting for you, and what I decided when I was spending time with my father this week is that, despite the zeal with which I sometimes (often!) put myself through terrible things, I do not want to wonder about that ever again. Which is a thought that makes me smile.
So yeah, if I was to really tackle that subject, it would drone on and on for book-length soliloquys of nothingness, because at the end of the day, my experiments show...nothing.
Anyway, I met the guy from some famous band called El Recodo in the botanical garden in Toluca and he was very nice, and some government official asked me to photograph the two of them together and then I guess he was so grateful that he offered me a free trip to the zoo with 77 schoolchildren, which I promptly accepted. So on the bus with the schoolchildren I got to know a guy that worked for the organization that takes these rural kids to places like the zoo and the botanical garden and we got to talking about immigration and slavery and history and Mexican futbol. My father didn't get back from work til three in the morning, and then he jumped awake at 5, stumbled around until he found a phone in the dark, and called my mother to see how she was doing (she'd been sick). Then he went back to sleep.
My father and I spent lots of time together doing unremarkable things, and then this morning he went to the airport and I went to the bus station and that was that.
I spent a lot of the six-hour bus ride looking out the window. I was kind of lucky that this bus was making a stop in Nochixtlan first before heading into Oaxaca city, so I got to do some Mixteca sight-seeing. I was thinking about how hard I bucked against these landscapes, these hot, dry, sometimes almost lunar landscapes, when I first got here. I thought about how much I sometimes still wish to be in foggy wet mountains, either in North Carolina or in Colombia, eating some sweet corn thing and wishing I had a sweater. (I think some of this is nostalgia from forcing my roommates to watch the No Reservations Colombia episode again.) But now, I don't just look at these landscapes as my own experience (oh, yes, what follows is bullshit, but guys, it's also true!), I also think of them as the home that thousands have had to leave, that people living in some grey city in the North daydream about, missing the cactus and the soil-that-is-really-sand and the sun and their loved ones, the way I miss mine, and I am grateful, because even if I am not taking in surroundings that make me feel at home, and frankly I feel sick or at least uncomfortable most of the time, these surroundings are someone else's home that they miss and wish to return to, and this place at least tolerates me, in my scrappy-kid-pretention, and I will always love it for that.
And is it so wrong that I am in such a good mood that I am listening to this?
It is not.
Also, because I have been thinking about it, watch this one:
Cheers!
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