Once every 2-3 weeks, I’ll have a day where, for the life of me, I cannot get up or out of bed and I end up sleeping for like 14 hours straight. Today was one of those days. Resultantly, I didn’t get a whole lot done. I’m trying not to worry about it; my first day of classes are tomorrow and I have all the materials I need for them already prepared. Perhaps it is best that I got some rest today. That said, I don’t have all of the materials for Thursday/Friday ready yet, so this will mean more work for later. It is what it is. I did manage to set up WhatsApp groups for each of my classes in order to share the links to our respective Zoom meetings, but I have a nagging suspicion that somehow, 1/3 of the kids won’t figure it out. We’ll see.

Reading club at 10am. There was a new person there today, 15 year-old girl named Ingrid. From what I could make out, Tayde and Ingrid’s mom are friends, and Tayde talked her friend into sending her three daughters to reading club, except the older two were able to come up with excuses not to, leaving Ingrid, timid and alone (lol). Today’s story was by a different Chiapan author, Eraclio Zepeda, and was once again very sad, although this time it was less Kafka-sad and more Shakespeare-sad. After the story, I talked to Tayde about splitting the weekday lessons in half so that Sherrill and I can work on our own levels, at our own paces. Tayde was already on the same page, which was good. We will talk with Sherrill on Monday (She is going back to California this weekend to renew a visa).

After this, I took a nap, then worked all afternoon and evening, talking occasional breaks. I rediscovered Frog and Toad while looking for books to teach; I had forgotten how funny those books were. I feel Toad in my soul. Other than that, not much new. It’s been a stressful string of days, but a good stress, born of genuine excitement and investment in things to come.

Today was pretty-much the same as every other day this week except that it was Friday, so I also tutored the twins who live in Milwaukee. This was nice, as it’s always fun to see them, plus I was able to try out some of the games I had planned for my classes, but it also meant less time to prepare lesson plans for next week because I was planning different lesson plans for today. I’ve decided to stay in town this weekend so I can get more done. On a side note though, round-trip tickets from here to Mexico City are only $60, so I may make plans to go sometime soon. They have a bunch of art museums there that I’m trying to go to (in particular, I really want to see this mural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Mexico_(mural)) and probably some other cool stuff too.

I returned to the laundromat after class today (the school and laundromat share a courtyard [and 1 cat] but I didn’t want to bring all of my dirty clothes to class, so I made two trips). It turns out they were definitely open when I stopped by yesterday, I simply failed to find the doorbell. The women who work there are named Rosa and Margarita and I’m going to do my best to remember their names because I see them pretty-much every day. They told me my clothes won’t be ready until tomorrow evening, which means I’ll probably have to wear a long-sleeve shirt tomorrow. I was already super hot today because my only clean pants are jeans. The sweating never stops here; some days it feels like it’s all I do. I’ve been trying to work out the precise volume produced (apologies in advance). I drink four liters of water a day (this is very consistent; I have to buy a new jug daily), plus a coffee or two, and maybe a jamaica* from a restaurant (*not pronounced like the country, but rather “huh-mike-a”, it’s a strong hibiscus tea served cold that tastes like a less-tart cranberry juice), each around 16 ounces. There are 33 fluid ounces to a liter, which means about five liters total daily fluids. There are only two ways those fluids can go from here, so determining how much I sweat is a simple matter of subtraction; all that’s left now is to find a bucket to piss in.

Upon returning from class, my host dad asked me to help set up the family’s new landline, which I did my best at. After a while, we came to the conclusion that it might be a bit broken. I’ve been talking to my host family a bit more lately, which has been nice. I do think my Spanish is improving, even if not as quickly as I would like.

After a brief nap, I spent the rest of the day planning lessons, taking occasional breaks to listen to music, eat a snack, or do pushups. I got through three days worth of beginner-level plans, which was one fewer than I was hoping for, but one more than yesterday. Tomorrow I’ll start with the plans for the advanced-level class, and at the rate we’re going, I’ll just improvise the conversation-level classes live. Today felt really long, and I suspect the days will continue to get longer once I have to actually teach the classes in addition to planning them. Not that this is a bad thing; I do think teaching will be fun and I expect that the planning process should get easier once I start getting active feedback from students. But at the same time, I might end up spending the whole weekend planning, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Class in the morning. Afterwards, a phone call from a friend and an irresponsibly-long nap (faulty alarm?). The laundromat was closed, so my clothes are still dirty. I now have full plans for two-and-a-half days of my beginner-level classes, plus a week’s worth of outlines for the advanced and conversation classes. Tbh, I was hoping to be a bit further by now, but it turns out this is kinda hard. I did make a schedule, so that should help me stay on track. I have a love/hate relationship with calendars; it’s nice to not forget things, but I don’t like to feel as though my days are totally subject to the whims of past-Adam. This is, of course, a fallacy, as all of my decisions are ultimately subject to the whims of past-Adam. But putting it down on paper really shoves it in your face.

Today in class, Sherrill repeatedly confused the words “poco/poquito” and “chico”. That, or she’s been cooking a boy in her apartment.

After a nap, I worked on more lesson plans, taking occasional breaks to read on my balcony. I was able to finish Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrilliard (postmodern philosophy fraught with nihilism and sci-fi-esque paranoia; thought-provoking, so long as you have a high tolerance for linguistic ambiguity) and I saw a bat, who made a few swoops under my alcove and hung out a couple feet away on the wall for a bit. Bats are cool (I have an affinity for all fellow nocturnal mammals), and I’ve never seen one this close (or still). That said, it was kinda small; I expected the bats here to be bigger. There’s certainly no shortage of giant bugs for them to eat.

In the evening I talked with my dad for about an hour and a half about various tools for teaching online. I’m feeling a lot better about upcoming classes now. There’s also a fair amount of teacher advice on Youtube. Of course, I’m also prepared to throw away everything I have and start from scratch after a week of classes, but that’s a next-week problem.

To stay cool, I generally go to sleep with a fan running, which incidentally produces a lot of white noise. Last night the power went out (more on that in the previous post) so my room was silent, meaning there was nothing to cover up the sound of roosters and, swear-to-god, fireworks at 5am. Between that and having had trouble falling asleep in the first place, I woke up exhausted, but I was unable to get a coffee on my way to class because the power was still out.

Class is continuing to move slowly, I think I’m going to ask tomorrow about splitting our lesson in half. The lack of sleep/coffee certainly played a role, but I felt myself becoming very impatient during today’s activities and I don’t want to continue like this. The one good thing that came of class was that we rearranged the artificial bookshelf-wall separating the resource room from the first classroom, so I can now access both without needing a new key. Then, two different people then warned me not to let the cats “popo” inside the rooms.

The power was back by the time class was over, so after a long nap, I returned to the school to work on lesson plans. I now have a week’s worth of learning objectives for two of my three classes, but I’m still not sure how to make anything engaging out of a Zoom conference. I’m getting kinda nervous about the speed at which the first day of class is arriving, but I’ll brainstorm with my dad tomorrow. I think that should be good.

My host mom deep-cleaned the house today, which hopefully means the cockroach is gone. For now.

12:35 am: I was seated on the toilet, pants at my ankles, doing bathroom things, when I looked down to see a cockroach crawling around in my shorts. Moving fast, I evacuated the room and shut the door, only to learn the hard way that the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor was more than cockroach-height. I grabbed the hardest, heaviest object I could find (in a cruel twist of irony, an ecology textbook) and chased the bug into the corner of the room. Heart racing, spirit pitched in mortal combat, I raised the book in preparation of the final blow – and with a crack of thunder, the power went out, plunging us both into darkness. By the time turned my phone light on, the roach was gone.

Every day, roughly an hour before dusk, hundreds of brown-black, ratlike birds take flight from all corners of the city to convene upon a single tree in the town plaza, with the ostensible purpose of making was much noise as they possibly can; their chirps and trills growing louder and steadier as the sun sets, converging to a single, unending scream, matched in temper by the scarlet sky. I don’t know what draws them to this particular, centrally-located tree, or why they feel the need to make so much noise (I am want to label it an act of civil disobedience, an assertion by the birds that while they cannot control the city, they retain the power to annoy all its residents), but today one of them shat on me while I was eating, so war has been declared.

Also in the square tonight was a clown, the same as last Sunday evening. This clown has been the only performer I’ve seen in the plaza, and is evidently quite popular. Some Jungians on Wikipedia claim the role of the clown has typically been filled by a priest or other religious figure as a profane inversion of stiff-necked ecclesiastical order. I personally find the concept of a clown who’s also a priest to be even scarier than that of a regular clown, but simultaneously believe that there should be more juggling acts incorporated into church.

Not much else new today. I read a bunch of short stories in an effort to find something interesting and level-appropriate for my conversation class. I found a couple that will work, but more is always better; if you have any favorite short stories with relatively simple language, feel free to send them my way.

Two nights ago, after brushing my teeth, I noticed a large, overturned beetle failing around on the wet floor of the shower. Unsure what to do, I slid the door, trapping it in. The following afternoon, I returned from class to find the beetle gone.

That night, after turning out the lights and getting in bed, I heard a weird scratching noise and turned on my phone flashlight. The beetle was back and on my bed, only a foot away. Realizing now what it was (I had been previously unsure whether it was a beetle or a cockroach and thus unsure of how irrationally afraid I should be), I got out a notebook for it to climb on and relocated it to the balcony. Beetles and I can coexist, but we cannot share a bed.

Today there was another Saturday reading club, during which I confirmed what I thought I had previously only hallucinated. Tayde’s ringtone in fact is Still D.R.E. by Dr. Dre. I don’t know what to do with this information; suffice to say it really complicates my picture of her.

We read another Rosario Castellanos short story about the struggles of indigenous Chiapans. I really like the way Castellanos writes, but once again the subject matter was pretty depressing. Especially when you consider that the indigenous people of Chiapas were pretty lucky compared to those who lived in what is now the US.

I had contemplated going to San Cristobal today, but I decided to stay back, in part because I was tired, and in part because I begin teaching in nine days and don’t really have any lesson plans yet. two days ago, Tayde gave Sherrill a set of two keys to open the classrooms and the resource room at the school (I was supposed to get a set as soon as they found another). Yesterday, Sherrill gave one of the keys to me because she said they were the same and both worked. This evening, after eating an absurdly large hamburger, I returned to the school, only to find upon arrival that the key I had did not open the resource room. I’m pretty sure there are a bunch of lesson plans in there that previous teacher left, but I don’t know for sure, because I can’t get in. Resultantly, I didn’t get much done, but I did get to spend more time with Chibi the cat, so not all was in vain.