I finally made it to the post office today. It’s a funny office, with character, though maybe not the kind of character that inspires confidence in mail-delivery abilities. Entry is limited to a small portion of the room near the door, cordoned off by four filling cabinets of various sizes, the tops of which also form the front desk. In the back, two crooked tables hold up a computer, a typewriter, one of those scales where you have to slide the weights along a lever, and a black trash bag with various papers spilling out. It appears no one has swept since the pandemic began. Envelopes and boxes cannot be purchased on site, so the man in front of me has repurposed a snack food carton. The one woman working is friendly and helpful. 5/5 experience.

I guess there was a pretty big earthquake today in Acapulco. I appreciate that many of you have checked in, but Acapulco is like 600 miles away and I am totally fine. This seems like a good time to note that Mexico is way bigger than you think. This is partly because of the way maps are distorted, and partly because I don’t think brains are very good at conceptualizing unfamiliar distances. Sometimes I think I can travel to one of the nearby states over the weekend and then I find out it’s ten hours away. Similarly, everyone here assumes that Milwaukee is just a short drive away from Canada.

For the most part, a regular day. There is a new person staying at our house, a Russian-Canadian teacher named Katerina. I haven’t really had a chance to speak with her yet. My friend called and we spoke on the phone for like two hours; it was good to catch up with them and nice to be able to talk to someone else who has just started working in a new city. I meant to get a bunch of lesson planning done tonight, but I didn’t. This seems to be a common theme on weekdays. I had planned to work on an additional essay for Saturday, because I think the daily blog format is getting kinda boring, but this seems less and less likely to happen. We’ll see.

Class, eat, planning, nap, class, eat, planning, sleep. Tried to call a friend but I couldn’t log in to Facebook messenger because the dual-factor verification code won’t send to my phone, presumably because I’m not in the US.

Observation: I’ve been to three hamburger places here and the burgers are always so wet? Every burger is like 70% sauce. Ketchup, and mayo, and mustard, and thousand-island dressing. They have basically made a soup sandwich.

I meant to wake up at 10:30 today, but I accidentally set my alarm for 10:30 pm and not 10:30 am, so I woke up around 2:30 in the afternoon. After that, lesson plans. I spoke to my parents in the evening. Overall, a rather uneventful day.

Last night I hit a second (third?) wind around 1 am after reading a really cool fact about seagulls in the ecology textbook I have with me. Then I couldn’t sleep for another two and a half hours.

In the morning I went to reading club and wrote a very short story, then moved to a different cafe to work on lesson plans, then back home to work more. For lunch (which was technically also breakfast) I found another place that serves the incredible pork soup. Later, for dinner (which was technically also lunch) I found the best quesadilla place yet. For post-dinner, I ate more eggs (I’ve been eating a lot of eggs lately, and they’re starting to get pretty boring). In all, I was able to knock out a whole week’s worth of lesson plans for my advanced class, listen to some podcasts, and meditate for a half hour (I’ve been getting back into this recently, and in combination with everything I’ve been reading lately [eg. cool seagull facts], I feel like I have been gaining a lot of insight. I’ll write more when the time feels right). If I can keep up this pace for a couple more days, I should be able to travel next weekend instead of staying home to plan more lessons.

I have been having trouble keeping in touch with a good friend from Madison. This is bothering me. Otherwise, things are good.

We lost power about forty minutes ago. Luckily there was a box of candles lying around, and now that they are step up (which was especially important because the staircase lacks any sort of railing), there’s not much to do but write as much as I can with what’s left of my laptop battery. 

We made breakfast during our Spanish class today (same as last Friday). Eggs again, but this time with a spicier salsa than before. Then a nap. 

**goddammit, the power is back. I was all excited that the internet was down because it meant I wouldn’t have to work on lesson plans tonight, but now I have no excuse.**

Afternoon classes went well; after the classes I had my weekly tutoring session with the twins in Milwaukee but the power gave out about twenty minutes in. It came back for about ten minutes, during which I managed to charge my phone a bit and cook some scrambled eggs, but the second I sat down to eat the eggs, the lights went out again. 

I assigned my conversation students to write a 200 word science fiction story this weekend, which means I need to do it as well. If it’s good, I will share it here as well. If it’s bad, you’ll never know, and hopefully the students won’t notice. I read like 30 sci-fi short stories in the past week trying to find ones that were sufficiently short and uncomplicated, but still interesting. This one was a bit too much (in both vocabulary and subject matter) to teach, but it was my favorite, so I’ll share it here. Enjoy. http://sites.asiasociety.org/asia21summit/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/3.-Le-Guin-Ursula-The-Ones-Who-Walk-Away-From-Omelas.pdf

There are way more verb tenses than I thought there were in Spanish. For all the difficulties of learning Arabic, there are only three tenses, which is a good number, I think. Very sensible. Spanish has fourteen. English has twelve, and with fewer forms.

After class I bought some prickly pears (cactus fruit) to eat at home, but I soon discovered that they are full of really tough seeds and just taste okay. 2/10.

A couple days ago my friend suggested an online, Pictionary-style game, and today it was a hit with the beginner students. The only problem was that I had purchased a 1.5 liter water bottle just before class and I am unable to sit next to a beverage without mindlessly finishing all of it, so by the time classes was over I was ready to wet myself.

In the evening, I found a better pizza place than the one I had been going to. Then I sat down to work on lesson plans, but ended up writing a really long email instead. I need to go to the post office tomorrow. I’m writing it here so I don’t forget.

I slept terribly last night, so after my Spanish class I took a four-hour nap. How do adults function? Like, I don’t even work full-time and I’m always tired. I’m eating vegetables, I haven’t touched any booze in a month, I drink lots of water; I guess I haven’t been exercising lately (it’s too damn hot), but I did that in the past and I was tired then too. Is there another thing I should be doing? Am I just stuck with a drowsy disposition? Is everyone this tired all the time (and if so, can we just collectively agree to sleep more and work less)?

After class, a blonde dude with blue eyes approached me and asked, in English, if I knew any good places to eat at, so I took him to dinner. This was a nice coincidence, as I had been meaning to start talking to more people, but chatting up strangers is hard. Stan is 23 and from Amsterdam. He speaks six languages (goddamn Europeans got us beat) and just completed an MBA. He’s been in Mexico for about a week now and will be here for about three weeks more (though he’ll only be in Chiapa de Corzo through Friday). It was good to talk to someone new who wasn’t a teacher or student. Apparently some French dudes he met in Mexico City will also be arriving in Chiapa de Corzo tomorrow, so maybe I will meet them as well. We got food at one of the restaurants on the plaza, but midway through our meal, it began to downpour. By the time we finished eating, the streets were running several inches deep with water. The weather services are super inconsistent here (at this point, my phone still said it wasn’t raining) so we had no idea whether the storm would end soon and decided to make a run for it. I showed him to the grocery store and then made my way home, through what was essentially a river The effect was surreal. Ankle-deep currents ran through the streets as parabolic cascades poured off the rooftops and out of the spouts; the combined effect being the temporary disappearance of the town-as-it-is and its momentary replacement with a Chiapa-de-Corzo-themed waterpark. I arrived home wet from head to toe, and, as could only be expected, it stopped raining about ten minutes later.

A more or less regular day. In the beginner class today, I tried to have the student make little books by cutting, folding, and gluing a piece of paper. It took about three times as long as I had anticipated, and a handful of kids still managed to cut or glue it in such a way as to render the book unusable. The next time I have to introduce vocabulary, we’ll be trying something else. On the bright side, falling a day behind the plans means one less day I have to plan.

In the evening I decided I would finally buy some eggs and start cooking in my house. I greased the pan, cracked all the eggs, added my cheese, and realized that we had run out of matches earlier in the day, leaving me with no way to light the stove. I covered everything and ran to the store, only to come back and find out that the reason my host family had been gone was because they had left (a few minutes before I got home) to go buy matches at a different store. Now we have matching matchbooks. We can start so many fires.