And It Begins Again...

So, the first week of university is behind us, and I have to say that I thought I would have a little more to bitch about than what I do. Or, perhaps I truly despised the last two classes so badly that this crew has goodwill to just burn through, if they want it. Either way, I actually like this crowd. I mean, I really like them. They've shown more sparks of intelligence in the first week, where we don't really do anything anyway, than the last crowd did all semester. And they seem to have their own personalities.

Mama is impressed.

So far, we have talked about Isaac Asimov, I have a self proclaimed "radical atheist", and Monty Python has made its way into the classroom. One girl announced that she was a legal midget. Of course, I have one student who thinks he's the second coming of Ray Bradbury, leaving me with a short work of sci-fi to read over my break. I can still tell who the slackers are going to be (a skill which never fails to amaze me). One girl wants to take a snooze, which I'll need to nip in the bud next week. But so far...we're actually cool.

I have three boys who took the class together, because they're bffs. They had a fourth boy with them, but he was apparently too dumb to figure out how to sign up for my class and accidentally put himself in someone else's. It took us two days to figure out where he was really supposed to be. They're the ones who brought Monty Python into the classroom. As part of an ice-breaker/group work thing, I had them get into groups and come up with three questions. Their questions obviously came from the search for the Holy Grail. "WHAT is your favorite color??" "For what do you quest??"

So, today I decided to answer in kind. And, to turn the tables on them, I made them answer me back.

I read the paper: "WHAT is your favorite color?? Blue...no, wait, yellow! (And you say)???" That threw them off guard and the looks on their faces were priceless. As to the second question, I told them I wanted to answer correctly, but instead went for an answer from elsewhere in the movie.

"For what do you quest?? Answer: A shrubbery!!! A nice one...not too expensive. Now... GO!" They were giggling like 5th graders and declared it "the best answer ever."

And with that, I dismissed class.

--Virgil, Shocker of Students (this is why I'm hot)

Acapulco Part 4

One of the most exciting things we did in Acapulco was to visit the divers. I had so many gorgeous pictures of them on the roll of film that is stuck in the destroyed camera. You'll have to settle for the three I had on another roll of film until me and Director/Buddy can possibly pry the other loose. No camera repair shop will touch the job, so it's up to me to come up with the last ditch effort to save the film.

Acapulco is famous for its cliff divers, who hold the record for the longest dive in the world. Supposedly, the only way to become a diver is to be born into the family of one. There is one female diver, since one of the male divers didn't have any male children. They jump into the water and swim over to the cliff and actually scale the cliff before they dive from it.



The scaling of the cliff part is pretty impressive, as they go up in their speedos (speedoes??) with no shoes, basically, which looks pretty damned dangerous all by itself. There is a team of divers, and they begin diving from lower points, all of which are still pretty freakin' high. The final jump from the top of the cliff is precipitated by a show of praying to the shrine at the top (the Virgin of Guadalupe), and then the guy jumps.



See that beautiful, blue Pacific Ocean in the background? That's what is supposed to be in all my other shots, not the damned haze!!

This dude has the pictures I was hoping to get from the other roll of film, which shows the prep and all the excitement of the dive. I was surprised at how caught up in it I got. My heart was racing. It was a beautiful dive from the very top--so long in the air that I got to snap the picture twice.

I really need to dig that damned film out of that camera, even if I have to manually rewind it myself!!

-- Virgil

Acapulco Part 3

This was the sunrise I got every morning from my hotel room:



Sigh. I miss it. What I also got before sunrise ever thought about happening was the insane traffic noises of Mexico. It was something I had forgotten about that came flooding back when I reentered the country. Mexican drivers are in-fucking-sane. Lanes and lines mean nothing to them. They honk as a way of communication. **honk** "I'm cutting you off." **honk** "Get a move on, the light turned green a millisecond ago!!" **honk** "Hey, you're a bus! Look at me, I'm a cab." **honk** "Woot, white women." **honk** "We're in a car. Whee." There are always tires screeching. Somehow, nobody manages to get into an accident. If you're a white tourist looking to cross the street, you'd best embed yourself in a group of natives and use them as an convoy. Because otherwise, you're dead meat. I saw four lanes of cars, buses and other bizarre vehicles crammed onto two lanes of road. And they all worked it out somehow. The taxi rides were always fun. And by fun I mean you thanked a minor deity you could get out of the car again without any broken bones.

The hotel I stayed at is actually in this picture. If you follow the line straight up from the corner of the brick wall in the bottom of the picture, that's more or less where I was. Whee! That one clipper-looking ship you see in the bottom right side is their "navy." At night, the lights come on and it looks like a disco ship.


Of course, our keen ability to get into trouble kicked in immediately. As we were walking up the beach, we saw in the distance a kid playing with a wooden box. The kid gets up and runs away from it. It was a nice box, we thought he left it behind on accident. Director/Buddy gets the box from the bay and carries it up onto the beach for the kid. Immediately there's lots of yammering and pointing and freaking out. We back away slowly. Turns out that was somebody's goddamn cremation box. Apparently, people go out onto the Pacific and cast the boxes into the ocean. This one had floated in with the tide. There wasn't anything in it. But leave it to us to desecrate somebody's tomb on accident. Sigh.

This picture makes me hate my camera. At my shoulder line you should see Pacific Ocean for miles and blue sky. Turns out it's just haze. Grr. My hat, clipped from my Navy Buddy, saved my bacon from frying on numerous occasions.



I love Mexico because it is a land of intense contradictions. And a sort of intensity that I like. Gorgeous homes will sit right next to tin shacks. Preteens walked the beach with beer bottles in hand. You could totally tell which part of the beach was the public part versus the privately paid for part. The growth in Acapulco is almost 100% related to tourism--giant condo complexes going up right and left. There's plenty of room for someone afflicted with a social work gene. But only a few streets away, the real Mexico still goes on, with its mangrove swamps and just that electrified charge in the air. I love it.

-- Virgil

Acapulco Part 2

A good chunk of our beach day was spent doing this:



Interestingly, the local activity directors' jobs seemed to include humiliating themselves for the amusement of white people. They were quite entertaining, I'll have to give them that.

Of course, when we go on vacation, we still have the social worker gene (the propensity to solve problems, gather information and combat social woes whether anyone wants you to or not) going on. So, we were full of atypical tourist questions. We were taken on tours of the neighborhood of the rich and famous. I spotted one gorgeous white mansion overlooking the bay on our drive into the city and I asked our driver "Que es?" "Oh, senorita, that Sylvester Stallone's house. Ees for sale: $10 million." Sylvester Stallone filmed Rambo II in Acapulco, and everyone wants to make sure you know it. That's all you ever hear about is how he shot Rambo in the lagoon and how Humphrey Bogart filmed the African Queen in one of their lagoons. We were more interested in the following:

What does a gallon of gas cost? Turns out around $6.
What's the high school graduation rate of the people here? Turns out about 20%. Yikes.

Some of the activities we did including horseback riding on the beach (not really all I thought it would be), a visit to see their turtle protection program, a tour of the city, an accidental tour of the real city when I got us lost trying to get a luchador mask for Dante, and boating through a lagoon and seeing all sorts of wildlife. But part of the joy (and pain) of travelling with Director/Buddy is that she has her own bizarre sense of what interesting things to investigate are. She is utterly fascinated with convenience stores. What sort of junk do other countries consume? She went in *every* convenience store and fingered nearly *every* item. Not to buy it, mind you. Just to examine it. Then she'd trot us next door into the next one to see if it had anything different. She had to shop in their Sam's Club (Acapulco had two of them) just to see if her card would scan. She took great pleasure in this. Any buddy other than me would've probably been ready to kill her. We burnt up a lot of shoe leather. But I'm an easy-going travel partner like that. I mostly thought it was funny. I wish I had video of her going through the convenience stores saying "Huh!!" every 15 seconds and turning things over and over.

Oh, and there was kayaking with pretty little Mexican boys. Of course, we totally ignored their commands and made like hell straight for the open sea and thought we were going at a good clip until the guy caught up with us and basically corralled us into doing the accepted version of the kayaking part. I'm deathly afraid of water, so going out on the bay in a stupid kayak was a pretty big deal for me.


-- Virgil, survivor of kayaks

Acapulco Part 1

What follows is my recollection of my vacation, which I can mostly remember. My pictures didn't turn out as hot as I thought they would. And I busted my camera wiping out in a kayak, but turns out the pictures it was taking weren't up to its usual quality job anyway. So I need a new one. I like something I can slip in a pocket. I'm not opposed to going digital. I want something that'll take quality shots. Any recommendations would be appreciated. OK then. Here's two shots for now:

This was my part of the beach. I stayed at the Ritz and basically got in the elevator, went out the elevator door and stepped on the beach. A few more steps, and I was in the bay. I managed to go to other places in Acapulco and get in the Pacific Ocean, which I think is more beautiful than the Atlantic.



Part of the endless scenery of Mexico is the street vendors. In this case, we had a lot of beach vendors who would prowl the perimeters of the hotels trying to sell you scarves, hats, sunglasses, braiding services, you name it. I tried to negotiate with one of them, but she was too high. Director/Buddy snapped the picture. She appears to be hiding behind the tree. Director/Buddy was sitting where we were having breakfast. It was an open dining room that faced the beach, and the only thing between us and it was a net. It was gorgeous. I love the combination of food and aesthetics anyway, and to get my meals with the scenery I did and the breeze from the bay was just...wonderful.

I got pretty good at bargaining with vendors, and the one time I let myself pay more than something was worth was when I had a hell of a hangover and just couldn't be bothered to haggle in my quaint version of Italian and Spanish mangled together--"Italish", I was calling it. I've noticed when I go to Mexico (the last time around was filled with international intrigue, srsly) that the language thing works much differently than a classroom for foreign languages. You start to think and understand in that language. I couldn't tell you exactly what somebody had said to me, but I could tell you more or less what was going on. And I was usually right. It's just a different level of immersion that gets parts of your brain going you never knew existed.

More later. :)

-- Virgil

There's a Perfectly Good Reason Why...

...I'm including this poorly lit and oddly colored picture of myself holding Fanny Fern.



It's because that in the year that we've had her, this is the first time that she let anybody hold her up. She would get in your lap or sleep on top of you, but you couldn't pick her up and carry her. She would flee the moment she got a free claw into you. So, at the dinner table, she jumped in my lap, and I put my arms out like that, to give her a perch. She climbed right up, and to my surprise, she let me get up and carry her around. Some cats just don't like to be held, but our runt Fanny came with some trust issues.

So, that's pretty special to me. :) It means I'm a good cat Mommy.

-- Virgil, Cat Mommy

Halloween, a Bit Late

So yeah, it's a little late for the Halloween pictures, but so what? I just got them back in the middle of my Acapulco pictures. This was the costume Dante had for 2007. In the daylight, it's not so spooky. But those pink eyes glowed on and off, and at night, it really freaked out the little kids, which is really what Halloween is all about, anyway. We give out candy for the first part of trick or treat, and then Dante goes around and gets his share. For the giving out part, I sat at the top of our stairs to the house, and he hid under them. As unsuspecting children mounted the steps, he would stick his ax through the crack in the stairs and growl or roar, or put his bony hands through. Sometimes he poppped up completely. It was highly effective. And rather hilarious.


After Halloween, Dante carved his first ever pumpkin with El Hijo. Then we watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" As a former Jehovah's Witness, Halloween was a pretty evil holiday to participate in. So the whole carving a pumpkin thing is new to me. Apparently, they are messy. Very messy.



Apparently, messy equals "hella fun."



I have to take this moment to really brag on El Hijo. He is truly a great stepdad, and Dante is lucky to have him. Dante has really taken to him as both an authority figure and as a friend. He gets Dante to do things that I can only scream of. :) They've really bonded as dudes, and El Hijo goes out of his way to father him. I'm not cutting down his biological dad. I'm just saying that El Hijo is one hell of an appreciated stepdad. The proof, as they say, is in the puddin':

It Was The Best Of Times, It Was The Worst Of Times

If you'd like a synopsis of this entry, here it is: bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, sniffle, bitch bitch bitch. If you'd like specifics, read on.

There's at least half a foot of snow on the ground and counting, so instead of being back at work taking care of business, I'm snowed in and have finally worked myself around to an update. It's not as though I don't appreciate the time to myself. I've certainly needed it to get over last week. While the week in Acapulco was one of the best weeks of my life, the week in Indy had to be one of the worst. Of course there is some hyperbole there, but honestly it was pretty miserable.

My week in Acapulco was originally intended to replace having to go in for "festivities" at all. There are no holiday events at my own family's home, and all of our relatives have long since stopped trying. It would be plenty awkward trying to revive that anyway--my parents kept us purposely distant from them, and quite frankly, I don't like many of them. My in-laws are sweet people, but they are very close knit. They don't treat me badly at all, but most of them make little effort to get to know me, and there are few opportunities for that to happen anyway. I recently found out they think I'm a vegetarian, lol. It's pretty funny seeing what they've decided I'm about and trying to match that up with what I'm actually projecting when I'm around them. Being a former Jehovah's Witness, holidays are just weird for me, as I've blogged about before. None of the rituals are familiar. I'm still coming to grips with how to accept all the presents that come my way. Half of them seem to think I only enjoy hand made, organic products. Which are OK, but I feel like they really went out of their way to find something "Virgil would like." lol.

On top of that, the idiosyncrasies El Hijo has grown up with and tolerates, don't exactly sit well with me, particularly with my personality, which is more about "let's just fix this, OK??" My in-laws are very upper middle class bourgeoisie people. They like their "bourgy" experiences and their lifestyle. Most of what we would probably talk about would shock them. To me, the best way to describe it is that it's one giant upper class cocktail party. The conversation is rarely deep and you dress for the occasion. Don't think I'm trying to slam them, or anything, as they are good people and have always been good to me. But that's just what it feels like. It takes the whole tribe to make a decision: "What do you think we ought to do today?" "I don't know, what about you?" "Well, somebody needs to make a decision!" And of course no one can for another hour and a half. But it's a good money bet that one of the decisions will be to go shopping. :) I hate indecision. I like working through a choice, but when everybody passes the buck and then complains that they've wasted their morning because no one will decide, that just irks the hell out of me. But not nearly as much as having El Hijo's father talk over him.

My father in law (fil) loves to talk, maybe even more so than my mother. When they were together talking at my reception, it was quite a comedy to behold. They jockeyed for position the whole night, and then both came away declaring privately that the other was "interesting, but boy did s/he like to talk!" Pot, kettle, black. What gets me is how my fil talks over El Hijo at his son's expense; there are plenty of interesting things going on in our lives. But the introduction of those topics are just springboards to talking about something else in my fil's life and thoughts. Once on the phone with me, before El Hijo and I were married, I called his parents' house to see if he'd left for school after a vacation break, to get a sense of when he would get home. Fil kept me on the phone for 45 minutes, during which time I said--nothing. That's right, he talked the ENTIRE time.

I absolutely cannot stand that, because I believe it demonstrates that he, or anyone else who does it, believes that whatever is going on in his life is infinitely more important, and that ours can't be worth talking about. I have quite the interesting little life he could find out about. But he doesn't ask me about my classes, my service learning project, my nonprofit work, or my recent vacation. It's OK--my mother doesn't either. I'm the in-law, I don't honestly expect to be of that much importance. The bonds you've built over several decades of your children's lives are obviously more important to you than the person you've known for less than five years, and I have no problem with that.

But what was especially galling to me was when the conversation steered toward El Hijo's field, and fil just blabbed straight through, even though half of what he was positing was dead wrong, and El Hijo couldn't get a word in edgewise. At one point he wanted to read his student reflection responses out loud to us, at which point I finally spoke up and said I'd just finished 44 student portfolios with an average of 6 reflections each, and I didn't really care to hear any more. He took it well, but I could tell he was pretty upset with us. I don't know if I'm more frustrated with El Hijo for not speaking up or my fil for being so benignly selfish. He's only that way because they enable him to act that way. But why on earth would I want to continue going in for a week's worth of cocktail talk and the minutia of his father's life? No offense, El Hijo, but that feels like a wasted opportunity to me. We don't get to know them better, and they don't get to know us better. So, no, I don't like going in.

This time around, we went to Indianapolis, where my sister in law lives. Since she has the only grandbaby, I figure we'll end up spending Christmases there. Well, they will, I have no plans on going back. We were all supposed to go up there, and El Hijo said that while we'd love to see them, we really didn't feel like sleeping on the floor. No problem, fil says, if it comes to that, we'll stay in hotels. So we pack our bags and go...

...to end up sleeping on the floor--on a slim mattress, but still on the floor. Turns out that Sis in law and her hubby (whom I enjoy being around probably the most) were in the process of remodeling their entire house. While she was very gracious and generous to all of us who piled into her home, I don't believe it was her idea to invite us all. I think it was sort of foisted upon her, and if I had asked more questions, I would've probably gracefully bowed out.Our bedroom had no door on it, no curtains in the window. When their 1 1/2 year old daughter woke up at the butt crack of dawn and decided to run up and down the hallways with her toys, shouting at the top of her voice, that was pretty much the end of sleep. I don't blame the kid--she's just being a toddler. The heat, for whatever reason, was largely absent. I've grown up with the idea that if you aren't the one paying the power/gas bill, you don't bitch about the heat, so I didn't. Turns out they didn't know it was down as low as it was, so maybe I should have. Since Fil got his bed, he didn't seem too concerned that the rest of us were sleeping on the floor or the couch. And I can't spring for my own hotel at this point, having just come off a trip plus it looks incredibly rude to put your suitcase back in the car and say, "Well, we're heading to a hotel, see you in the morning!" So we stayed. By the end of our stay several days later, I had a massive allergy attack that lodged itself in my ear. I haven't had an earache since I was probably 12 years old. I haven't been sick and needed medicine for probably two years. I'm taking some sort of sudafed thing for my allergies and I have drops for my ears. I'm still recovering.

Going to my own home was really no better. In fact, we put it off to the absolute last moment possible, because staying with my mother should require a haz-mat license. We got in around 8:30 Sunday night, with plans on leaving by 8:00 Monday morning. Not too much time to do damage. She had already arranged for my cousin, who has moved back from the Middle East for about a year now, to come over as soon as we arrive. So I'm no sooner through the door than fifteen minutes later she's on the phone. I tried to explain to her nicely that I was sick, on medicine and we had to leave in the morning. Couldn't she just pop in for a minute on her way to the store? How can I say no to that? The problem is, she never just pops in. She stays forever. She's used to staying up to the wee hours in the morning because where she lived it was too damned hot to do anything until the late night. So she gets there at 10:30 and doesn't leave until nearly midnight. I'm sick as a dog, and even after I politely worded requests that she leave several times, she just refused to do so. I can't get my son in bed until her three children are gone, and I certainly can't go to bed while they're still here--they run the hallways, just being kids, they keep Dante up (how can you make him go to bed when there are other kids there?), etc. etc.

There was the inevitable lecture that I should begin to pack my bags and figure out a plan to move back to Bumfuck, Kentucky as soon as possible, and that I would very soon begin to miss it. Har. At least this cousin attempts to find out what's going on in my life, although every time she tried, Mom found a way to try to disrupt it. Since Mom doesn't know how to relate to a successful life outside of the JWs, she finds it very uncomfortable when other people talk about my life or my little successes. Thus, when I got about three sentences into my cousin's question of what I did on my trip to Acapulco, Mom charged in with "I've always wanted to go to Niagara Falls!" and derailed the conversation towards that end. When I started talking about my job in nonprofit, she starting hammering on her banjo as hard as she could. Anything to distract from the possibility that I might be having a good life that she didn't have a hand in. In short, we went to bed late and pissed.

I have never been so glad to be home in all my life. What is the point in wasting the time you get for vacation around people who don't really give a care about the direction your life is taking? Why should you listen to them, when they won't do the same for you? I don't need just oodles of validation, but I got more out of a week with my buddy just toodling around than I did with a week's worth of both sides of family, who are supposed to care more about what you're doing with your life than acquaintances are, right? Right?? Family is always what you make of it. When Dante is big enough, I'm just going to fly him down to his family in Florida for Christmas and let him fly back. At this point, I have zero interest in ever going back to Kentucky again.

-- Virgil

P.S. Bitch, bitch, bitch!