Ok, so this is an inane post, but I’m stuck with a coding problem that I cannot figure out (GRR!), so I’m going to blog FOR NO GOOD REASON.

I keep seeing people wearing towels on their heads. And I am not talking about Arab people wearing turbans. I’m talking about Mexicans wearing brightly colored DISHTOWELS with little teapots and ears of corn and onions and other food items printed on them. I swear this is a conspiracy.

In the park, when I run, I always see a lady who drapes a bright green dishtowel over her head and then plants a big pink sun hat on top of it, assuring there’s no chance that towel might accidentally fall off thereby and ruin her outfit.

And the guy who endlessly mows and mows and mows the grass at the church near my house wears a tan towel that has a cross-hatch texture and little pictures of food all over it. He secures it to his head with a dirty baseball cap.

And this morning I noticed that the maestros (construction workers) who are working on the roof of one of the houses on my street are all wearing different colored towels on their heads with various types of hats clamping them on. They looked like they were part of some kind of weird circus act, rushing up and down the ladder, carrying buckets of wet concrete with their brightly colored heads.

I would have taken a picture of them if there had been any way to take it without getting caught. For all my running everyday I’m still not sure I can outrun a Mexican maestro wearing a towel on his head…

I’m all wild inside, as though something is curling and churning and wildly dancing inside me. The last few days have been a thing to behold.

Lately my running has been slow, methodical, dedicated. But yesterday I streaked through the Parque Kabah. I passed people who normally pass me, and I passed them moving fast. I felt I could have run as fast as I wished. It was an absolutely thrilling and very rare experience for me.

And I celebrated it by driving to the grocery store and hitting a parked car. I put a foot long gash along the side of my car using the nice strong bumper of a parked pick-up truck. I’ve been driving for 22 years. I have never hit anything, ever, until yesterday, when I hit a parked truck. Brilliant. I can’t even begin to explain to myself why I did this. I just wasn’t in my body somehow, which seemed so wrong after having such a good run.

When I got home I came unglued. Everything I touched seemed to break. I dropped an armload of laundry down the stairs into the cats’ food and water. I spilled bleach on a new shirt. I tripped going up my stairs. I dropped the phone while I was talking on it. The only thing I didn’t screw up was writing code, I wrote good code yesterday.

During the day a close friend had a crisis and needed my help which I was thankful to be able to give easily. Her crisis was primarily someone else’s fault. And the guilty party didn’t take any responsibility for it. So by the time I caught up with her, after the fact, she was feeling used and was a little unglued. So we sat there being unglued together, camaraderie.

And later on I learned that the mom of one of my best friends had just died in the morning. She had passed after a long battle with cancer. My friend had been by her mom’s side non-stop for the last month, but it was finally over. And by the time I learned of the death the body had been cremated.

This morning I got a text message at 5:55 am, it was the first step towards planning today’s funeral. Due to family travel plans the family needed to have the funeral this morning, between 9 and 9:30. And that’s exactly what we did. We gathered together, the 6 of us, both friends and family, and took the ashes to a beautiful beach.

Nothing much was said, my friend and her brother picked a rock out in the water and we all waded out and let the ashes go near it. We stood there, knee-deep in the swirling, churning, roiling sea and the ashes went, they went out around us and out and away. And then we attached a bouquet of white roses to the rock. So when the waves would break over the rock the first thing that would come up were the flowers.

This was a funeral I will never forget. There was something completely organic about it. No one needed to talk. The ocean said what needed to be said, and it did what needed to be done, it washed her away, it washed us all. It gave us something new, a new start, an empty place to fill. It was sad, and happy, and fabulous, and beautiful. It was right in a way that so few things in life ever are. And that, that organic, spontaneous, rightness has left me stunned, awed, and churning. Life is such an amazing, amazing journey.

Most days I run in the Parque Kabah, which, though not large, is the biggest protected natural area in Cancun. The park has a loop which is 1800 meters around, so it’s just long enough to make it good for running. And each day lots and lots of people do just that, they go and they run…or walk…or waddle.

As a regular at the park I am keenly aware of the other regulars, I know who belongs and who is new. And each person who goes there is a story in themselves.

The first story is the “juicey guy”, as we call him. He’s in his mid-50’s maybe. He rides a bike to the park each morning with a small cooler strapped on his bike rack. And he’s got big colorful promotional signs stuck all over his bicycle. From his cooler he sells freshly squeezed juices, mixtures of carrot juice, spinach juice, and various fruit juices. Sometimes he rambles on to people about the nutritional properties of his various juices. But most of my interaction with this guy consists of me running by quickly, hoping he won’t see me. When he does see me he usually rushes to grab my hand and slobber kisses on it, all the while crooning my name over and over as though it was his favorite song. The guy is a loon and he seems to be in love with me. So I work to avoid him.

Then there’s the “fruit lady”. Most people probably don’t think of her as the fruit lady, but I call her that because the first few times I noticed her she was carrying fruit as she was walking around the loop at the park. One time she had bananas in one hand and a large papaya in the other. The other time, just a day or two later, she was carrying a large pineapple in one hand and a plastic grocery bag with a long loaf of bread and some green leafy stuff sticking out of it. Both of the times I saw her with food she was power-walking, and she was doing LAPS. She was not just cutting through the park on her way home from the store, she was going around and around and around, huffing her fruit. These days I see her regularly, but most of the time she’s carrying hand weights, gone are her fruits.

A few times recently I’ve seen a guy walking in the park who is flanked by two very OBVIOUS bodyguards. The first time I saw the “guarded guy” I noticed how over dressed he was, he had one of those colorful nylon jogging suits on, and he had the jacket zipped all the way to his neck. It was 90 degrees out. And his two henchmen both wore matching mirrored sunglasses, and brand new looking t-shirts, and both were very obviously and carefully examining every one of the people they passed. The “guarded guy” and his henchmen don’t go together either, they look like they don’t belong together. The bodyguards look like overpaid redneck bouncers, while their quarry looks like he regularly uses lotion on his hands and probably knows how to read.

The first time I saw those 3 they were not talking, were not smiling, were just walking. The second time they were talking, and their body language was a lot more relaxed. The third time I saw them they were spread out, one in front of the other and were running. The bodyguards were huffing dangerously, like pre-heart attack victims, at the front and back, the “guarded guy” in the middle, looking like running was normal for him. And the most recent time I saw these guys they were all running, but not together, I recognized each of them separately as I passed them.

There are lots of other regulars in the park. There’s a tall black man who runs intervals of VERY fast sprinting followed by extremely slow almost-jogging in place. There’s a guy who always wears a bitter-lemon expression on his face, and stomps around the loop swinging his arms. There’s the “sloppy woman” who’s gait is so disorganized that I always wonder how she can walk like that; she flails her arms chaotically and has a funny twist in her walk as if her feet don’t work normally. There’s the “smiling old guy” who runs along slowly, grinning and grinning and grinning, wearing his headband and wristbands. His grinning is contagious and after years of resistance I’ve given in to always grinning back when I see him, and always wondering later what we are so happy about.

There are a few very fit athletes in that park. There’s a short little runner who always passes me like I’m standing still. And there’s “seiscientos” (600) who looks like he takes too many steroids, he’s in his mid-40’s and is super-buff with big, veined arms. This guy does 600 sit-ups every time he shows up. Other people come along and do 20 sit-ups, 40 sit-ups, maybe 100 sit-ups, but this guy just keeps going and going and going. And he talks the whole time he is doing his sit-ups, so someone he’s blabbing with always ends up asking him how many damn sit-ups he intends to do, and the answer is always “seiscientos”.

And then there’s little old me, plodding along at my 9-minute-mile-on-a-very-good-day pace, passing the old and fat and slow, getting passed by the young and fit people. I’m usually the only gringo in the place, the only pasty white chick there, but I’m there so often that I no longer get stared at. I have my stretching regime, my certain number of laps, my 100 sit-ups, my 40 (or 50 on a good day) push-ups, my leg lifts, and all the other crap I somehow remember to do each day.

I love going to the park and seldom get bored there. The people-watching is always rich, with each character becoming more like themselves each time I see them. And the work-out ain’t half bad either.

I just found the very cool Global Integrity web site. It’s a site which provides data about corruption in various countries around the world. Mexico, not surprisingly, gets a “weak” integrity rating, coming in at 65. Lovely. Charming. Tell me again why I want to become a Mexican citizen?

People here talk about corruption often. People discuss whether it’s origin is genetic. They discuss whether it can be blamed on the Spanish invasion almost 500 years ago (I say yes, just because it’s easy). They discuss if one can blame the Catholic Church for it. They talk about how corruption is taught in families and in schools. They talk about how to take advantage of corruption. But mostly, my friends at least, talk about how sick it makes them, how much they hate it.

But it surrounds us here and so we put up with it. 65. That’s 2 whole points better than Russia, folks. Woo hoo!

• Global Integrity Country Reports ~ Be sure to scroll down.

I’m an immigrant. And my husband was an immigrant when we met. And nearly all of my close friends here are immigrants. And many of my friends back in the US are immigrants. And so, as you can imagine, in my house we often discuss why people cross international borders to live in a foreign country.

Life as an immigrant is not easy, not here in Mexico and not in the number one immigrant destination in the world, the US. As an immigrant you stick out, everywhere you go, especially if you don’t speak the language fluently. Sometimes you might seem exotic or sexy or interesting to the natives of your new chosen land. But often you are treated as an outsider, you are a target for crime, and an easy target for the cops; you are forever removed from the culture, not privy to the inside joke.

If you qualify to live in your chosen country legally then life is easier. Being illegal grates on you, it makes it impossible to ever fully relax. When you are illegal you can’t easily rent a place to live, you can’t buy property, you usually can’t work in your own profession, you have trouble establishing credit, you may have trouble registering a car, and you can’t travel. It’s easy to tell the people who live somewhere illegally, the rule is that if they are not broke, and don’t travel home to see family then they are illegal. The exceptions come when their home country is so far away that plane tickets are ridiculously expensive, or when their family is nuts, or dead.

Some people put up well with being illegal, and when they do you have to wonder what the hell they ran away from. Because being illegal sucks, so if they can be happy that way then what they came from was worse.

I have friends who are illegal, lots of them here, and also back in the States. And I have slightly more friends who are legal in both places.

So why did my friends emigrate? Commonly the women moved because their husband got an important job in a new country. And sometimes the women moved because they needed to escape intense care-taking duties. In fact I know several women who moved here to Mexico to escape raising children that belong to their mentally unstable or substance addicted sisters.

I know people who’s spouses can’t get permission to live in their countries, so they chose to move to their spouse’s home country. I know people who moved to the US because they would make more money working in a kitchen there than staying in their home country and working in the profession they are trained for. I know people who moved here to Mexico to hide from something in their home country, be it child support payments, crazy relatives, a warrant, a stalker, a husband, an addiction. Everyone has a reason. And when they tell you that they “just love the beach” or “wanted a change” that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

But what’s most disturbing to me are not the people who are skipping out on child support or running from a bad divorce. What stops me in my tracks are the stories of immigrants who are escaping real persecution in their home countries.

Recently there has been talk of a small wave of immigrants coming to Cancun, who are coming from Eritrea. All of the cases I have heard of are men, young men, men who were once soldiers in the army there. They come saying that if they are forced to return to their country they will be shot. They come having deserted the army there. They have made their way across Europe, then they come here. And they try to get into Mexico, hoping to cross Mexico and sneak into the US I guess. And it doesn’t work, they screw it up. And they become desperate.

The stories range from a guy who fought off 5 men who tried to force him onto a plane back, to a guy who tried to commit suicide when they put him on a plane back. These people know beyond doubt that going back is worse than anything that could happen to them here. I can’t imagine what kind of hell these people live with, that they prefer being detained in Mexico to “going home”. As my husband always says “everyone has a reason”, but some reasons are better than others.

People often comment about how personal this blog is; they compliment me for it’s intimacy. And I truly appreciate their comments. But the fact is that there are lots of subjects I don’t feel free to discuss here.

Wondering yet? Well, to start with I don’t mention much about my relationships with my husband and my daughter. This is partly because when things are going well with them it’s not worth mentioning, and when things are not then I feel too raw and too exposed to tell more than one or two friends, so forget telling the whole world.

Another thing I don’t talk much about are the stresses of my job. I feel huge pangs of guilt when it comes to work. So if I’m having trouble focusing, or if I’m stuck with a problem I can’t solve, or I’ve lost motivation, it feels like rubbing salt into a wound to talk about it, even though it drives me nuts. I’ve found that the best antidote for work-sux-mode is to arrange things so I can have some small successes and then make sure I feel them. Often just a few small accomplishments will break the spell and get me back to being productive. But talking about it doesn’t usually help.

And of course I don’t talk about the dramas and problems in my friends lives. Sometimes it’s hard not to mention something here because I am so affected by the ups and downs that my friends experience. If someone discovers their partner is cheating, I’m wracked with the agony of that. If someone contemplates an affair, I feel the guilt and torment of even thinking that. If someone loses a parent, I worry over my mother’s health and safety. If someone’s child struggles, I stress more over my child. But if my friends want their troubles to be found by search engines then they can blog about them themselves.

Another subject I stay away from is my spirituality. There are two main reasons for this. The first being that my religious and spiritual beliefs are mushy, hard to define and non-linear, and I’m perfectly happy with that. I don’t need them to be defined by language and written in books the way many other people do.

The other reason is that there are quite a few people in Cancun who I have to deal with regularly, whose religious beliefs are vastly different from mine. And these people feel judgmental to me. I’m sure that if pushed they would tell me to my face that they are not judging me. But I get a strong sense from them that because I don’t attend their church they see me as mis-guided, as a lost soul, a godless heathen, whatever. And so I don’t feel I should publish what I really believe about these subjects. Perhaps I will feel differently at a later time when these people are not part of my daily life.

And finally I don’t mention much in this blog about my husband’s job and the international mafia which operates throughout the office he works in. The reason for this is simple. I don’t want them to kill him. Suffice to say that my husband has been pressured to join their ranks, and he has refused. But it’s a daily struggle for him. They feel threatened that he won’t join. He assures them he doesn’t need their money and won’t turn them in. It’s a delicate balance, and so I keep mum. But oh the stories I could tell…

I was browsing the classified ads in Novedades (a local newspaper) today and I came across this ad which just left me stunned:

American Businessman Needs a Wife

For those of you who don’t read Spanish I’ll give you my crappy translation:
American Businessman Needs a Wife
Between the ages of 25 and 45 years
Weighing between 50 and 70 kilos (110 lbs – 154 lbs)
Happy, good presentation (meaning presentable), housewife,
respectful, drug free
Absolutely serious

Then it has interview locations and times.

There all manner of ways in which this is offensive to me. First off the guy doesn’t give any information about himself. There just the icky looking picture. Ew!

Then it’s clear that he’s over 45 himself. Then there’s the fact that he’s advertising this in Mexico; so he expects Mexicans will all rush out and marry some creepy, desperate American guy they know nothing about? The worst thing is that they probably will.

Then I notice that he doesn’t want a woman with education, he wants a housewife. So he must be either terribly boring himself and really likes talking about the best way to clean those toilet rings or he doesn’t actually care if she’s AN INTERESTING PERSON. Well, she’ll be interesting all right, in a desperate, pathetic kind of way.

And then there’s the part about the weight. The average woman on the planet weighs around 142 lbs. So he’s eliminated a huge number of them just with that. Do you think he’ll bring a scale to his interviews?

But for me the worst of all is the crack about being respectful. I think that if I married this man I would not be able to respect myself or him EVER!!!!

The guy is holding the interviews in public, and they are walk-in appointments. So this process is public. That’s majorly icky. But I’m thinking of going and getting a coffee during one of his Cancun interview times. Maybe I’ll bring a bunch of my friends and sit there giggling at him…and taking surreptitious photos.

Probably I should be respectful, this poor man must be really lonely to be advertising this way. And I actually know several happily married couples who met “on the internet”, but somehow this is just too pathetic, too sleazy, too creepy, too one-sided for me. He should have just found a prostitute and offered her a lifetime position. And the woman, well my best advice is to get a great divorce attorney before you walk down that aisle!