Then two weeks of classes before the end of the semester. Reviews, exams, games, grades. I shit myself for the second time since arriving (simultaneously throwing up out the other end). It’s weird to say goodbye to the kids. Some have faces I’ve never seen. I spend the nights calling up friends. There’s a COVID scare and I have to skip my own farewell diner, but it turns out to be just a cold. The new teacher arrives; his name is Douglas and he seems pretty cool. We hang out for a bit. China cancels all incoming flights from the US and my next job is delayed for at least three months.

Today I leave for Chicago. The women at my favorite torta stand give me a free torta for the road (“don’t go to China” they say, ” they don’t have tortas there”). I meet my one adult student (Gabi, 26) for a final goodbye. I’m sad to leave, but excited to be back. See yall soon.

When my family arrived in Chiapas, I was on stage, in front of more than a hundred people, being led by Kuki the Klown through a mock-wedding with a a local girl. Thanks to a mix up with their taxi driver, my family had been running late and, growing bored waiting, I strayed too close to the clown show and was called onstage to participate. The girl was a good sport. I haven’t seen or talked to her since, but we remain legally wedded under clown law. 

Seeing my family again made me realize how solitary my days had become; I’ve grown used to the distance of online teaching and cross-continent phone calls. It felt a bit weird to spend so much time with physical people. We spent the week meandering from restaurant to restaurant, eating everything in our path and overcoming the resultant diarrhea by strength of will. Together we rode a boat through the towering stone faces of the Sumidero Canyon, explored the sprawling markets of San Cristobal, and got carsick upon the winding road to Palenque. Their presence increased my gringo vibes twenty-fold, and vendors hawking handbags, bracelets, and keychains were drawn to us as if by scent. It was the most fun I’d had in a long time. 

I fell behind a bit, but I’m back (to write one more rushed entry before I disappear again). Day three in Mexico City I visited Frida Kahlo’s house and the house where Leon Trotsky was assassinated. Day four, I visited the Palacio de Bellas Artes and caught an overnight bus back to Chiapas. Roughly 36 hours later, my parents and brother arrived on a visit, and I will entertain them for the next few days. I probably won’t write again until they leave. Merry Christmas!

I love Mexico City; there’s an organic energy here that’s lacking in other big cities. I suspect it’s 50% the street art on every exposed surface and 50% the lack of zoning laws which allows every sidewalk square to have its own street vendor. The result is a city that really feels full of life. A lot of the big tourist destinations are closed on Mondays, so I spent the day on a meandering path from the bus station to my hotel, taking excursions to any point on the map which looked interesting.

It’s been a while since the last updates, but never fear; I’ll be on this bus for the next 14 hours, so there’s plenty of time for me to fill you in. 

This past week was our last day of classes before the holidays. Christmas is pretty much universally celebrated in Mexico (although none of my students were actually planning on going to church) so we talked about the how the holiday is celebrated around the world and our plans for the long vacation (we have off until the 3rd of January). I tried to teach the students some Christmas songs, and spent a lot of time listening to Christmas music in preparation. I have come to the conclusion that Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You is, in fact, the best Christmas song. It’s a banger. A bop. It dings in the whip. I must have listened to it 50 times this week. Last Christmas by Wham! comes in close second. It doesn’t have quite as much feel-good holiday spirit, but it does have some killer synths. In third place is the theme song from the movie Gremlins, and every other Christmas song is tied for last. 

On Friday there was no class, but there was a party at Gina’s house with all of the teachers from the other school. Sherrill refused to go and Tayde was busy, so Luzma was the only other teacher I knew there. I would have tried talking to new people, but the music was so loud that there wasn’t much to do but dance. I stayed there for an awkward three or four hours and then walked home. I was able to finally identify the name of the most annoying song I’ve ever heard, so now I can share it with all of you. It’s called El Sonidito (The Little Sound), and I get the feeling it was made after someone drunkenly bet their friends that they could write a hit song with only one note. And they succeeded; I cannot stress enough how popular this song is. I hear it everywhere, and every time I do, it makes me want to leave wherever I am and go somewhere else.

I finished two books this week, a textbook on psycholinguistics called Language in Mind and a work of philosophy/early psychology by William James titled The Varieties of Religious Experience. The former was a really interesting look at some experimental psychology and its implications for our understanding of language. My biggest takeaway was that, for young children, language learning is not a guided by meta-rules about syntactic construction so much as probabilistic calculations of word or sound co-occurrences. We can learn break up speech sounds into discrete words by paying attention to consonant clusters; a particularly unlikely pair of consecutive consonants can show us where word breaks occur even if we don’t understand any of the linguistic content of the words (for example, a “d” sound followed by a “b” sound without a vowel between them is really uncommon in English. It almost never occurs inside of a single word. If an English-learning baby hears this consonant cluster, this is a good indicator that there are actually two words, one ending in “d” and one starting with “b”). Similar calculations about the likelihood of particular words following each other can be used to build rough equivalents of grammatical categories; in this way, kids will usually put their words in the correct order, even if they don’t actually know what nouns, verbs, or adjectives are. What was most striking to me about the book were the similarities between its proposed models of word activation and the maps generated by Natural Language Processing (NLP) Artificial Intelligence. After years of failing to get computers to learn human language by instructing them with meta-rules about grammar and linguistic content, the latest NLP programs have seen an incredible leap in achievement by simply providing computers with a large body of text and instructing them to build their own rules and categories based on word frequencies and co-occurrences.

William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience was another long, but worthwhile read. James was a psychologist (the founder of Harvard’s Psychology department) who was interested in the similarities between reported religious experiences across various faiths and denominations. James remains agnostic about the truth of any particular tradition, and instead examines a wide variety of primary accounts in order to focuses on the empirical human experiences which perpetuate belief in religious creeds and institutions. The chapter on Mysticism is an analysis I have been wanting for years; in it, James examines similarities in experiences of selflessness and ego-death across religious traditions, and sets up a foundation for the later study of psychedelic drugs by Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Ram Dass, and others. Religion is a topic that has long interested me as an area of study, for despite mutually-exclusive teachings, all of the world’s religions seem to be grounded in common feelings and impulses. This book was the best exploration of that phenomenon I have encountered.

Today, I decided to go to Mexico City; bus tickets are cheap, and I was able to book a room at the same hotel I stayed at last time for $10 a night.  The bus will take fourteen hours each way, but this is actually a plus, because I can sleep on the bus and avoid paying for a hotel on those two nights. In the afternoon, I arrived at the mall/bus station four hours early and watched the new Spiderman movie. It was definitely a Spiderman movie. If you generally like Marvel and Spiderman, you’ll probably like this one; it had the same lighthearted humor and fast-paced story that people have come to expect. If, on the other hand, you happen to believe that the Marvel movies have become vapidly self-referential spectacles which function less as films-in-themselves and more as a never-ending promotional campaign for the films-to-come, this is not the movie to prove you wrong. I enjoyed it, but I’ll probably have forgotten about it by next week. That said, it’s been a couple weeks since I saw the movie Encanto in theaters, and I have continued to think about that one. The animation is beautiful, the characters are very fun, and it’s nice to see an original concept treated with such a large budget. The ending isn’t perfect, but nonetheless the movie captures a particular vibe very well/ Though the film is, on paper, about a magic house and the magical family which occupies it, I can’t help but interpret it as a allegory about climate change and accompanying feeling of anxiety and impotence among those who can see the disasters coming, but feel powerless to stop them. The movie shies away from any real solutions, but you are all free to sabotage pipeline construction and harass your local elected officials as you see fit. I, for one, don’t feel like waiting for our house to collapse before we start acting to repair it. 

Update: I arrived, moderately well-rested at 8:45am. More updates will follow soon.

Last night, around one in the morning, I felt my bed begin to shake, ever so slightly, back and forth. My first thought was that this was the work of ghosts (to be clear, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe that if there were ghosts, they could haunt me whether I believed in them or not); however, after noticing that the water on my nightstand was also moving and that all of the street dogs had started barking at once, I determined that this was probably a small earthquake (though I suppose a sufficiently powerful ghost could probably pull off both of those tasks as well).

I had some trouble falling asleep, and lay in bed wide awake until around 3:30 or 4am. Then, having barely closed my eyes, I was awoken at 5:10am by dance music blaring from across the street. As I stumbled to the balcony for a better view, fireworks began to erupt. Roughly thirty minutes later, they decided to turn the volume down a bit, but the music continued without stopping until around 10am, all the while I prayed for an act of divine violence to break the speakers and return my peace and quiet. After my Spanish class, I tried to take a nap, but I was only able to sleep for about an hour before the party music resumed. It was at this point I decided that Chiapas has too many holidays.

Yesterday, instead of the standard Saturday Reading Club, we had a year-end party/exhibition at the cultural center where the Reading Club takes place, alongside the students from the painting and music classes. There were around fifty people in total, mostly children and their parents. Tayde assigned me to be the “poetic tarot reader”, so I spent most of the party sitting in a dark room with incense and a candle, telling people to choose from a set of playing cards, on the backs of which Tayde had glued short poems about the future. I did my best to appear authoritative and mysterious, but some of the poems Tayde picked were pretty advanced, leading to several occasions where the children told me they did not understand the fortunes I had given them, whereupon I was forced to admit that I didn’t really understand the poems either. Later we ate tamales, and after dinner the hosts brought out three piñatas, which is a reasonable number I think. In all, it was a fun party.

After the party I watched The Bee Movie, which was not a good movie, but which was an interesting movie. Maybe I’ll write more about it later. I also watched the new Disney movie, Encanto, in theaters last week, and I’d like to write about that sometime as well.

It seems Chiapa de Corzo has become a resting point for some sort of religious pilgrimage. From what I can gather, the pilgrims have come from the mountains around San Cristobal and intend to walk to the nearby state of Oaxaca to visit the Virgen de Juquila, a 16th century figure of Mary which survived a big fire unscathed. There are currently around two hundred people camped out in tents and trucks in the courtyard outside the big cathedral, playing music and eating lots of corn on the cob.

In other news, the local grocery store has starting bundling random items together as a “special deal”. My favorite is the single serving bag of Doritos with five packets of hot sauce scotch-taped across the front. I was admiring this ingenuity when I noticed that Mexico has an additional flavor of Doritos, called Incognito, which I had no choice but to immediately purchase and try, whereupon I learned that the mystery flavor was Worcestershire sauce. This was a pretty disappointing mystery, so I went back to the store to get some regular Doritos instead, and in doing so discovered that the standard Nacho Cheese Doritos in Mexico are slightly spicier and have a nice jalepeño flavor which is lacking in their American counterpart. This pleasant surprise balanced out my earlier disappointment, and I am now completely satisfied.

I’m going to try to start writing daily updates again; it’s been too long since I’ve written. That said, it’s pretty late, so this one may be brief. I just finished up my last assignment for my online course on Data Analytics and the Humanities. It was pretty interesting, but none of the assignments or feedback were so substantial that I couldn’t have learned the same thing by just watching the videos on my own rather than as part of the class. Still, it’s something to put on a resume. Learning doesn’t count unless you get a special piece of paper at the end.

My students received their first grades last week (they were supposed to go out a month ago, but there were some technical difficulties), and suddenly, the three-to-four kids who had stopped showing up to my classes returned all at once. Crazy coincidence, that.

In other news, it’s been at least two months since we’ve had any rain. The temperature dropped for a bit, but the heat is back this week. Part of me feels thankful for this, but at the same, there’s something perverse about watching people put up Christmas decorations when it’s 90 degrees outside. The spirit is in the right place, but it still feels wrong to me.