Alive And Restless
I’ve been getting emails from people who wonder where I’ve gone off to. Well, don’t get your typing fingers all twisted up…I’m still alive and bitching.
I’ve been lately in a netherland between a state of whiny immobilized self pity and driven motivated work frenzy. The frenzied work part is good, an improvement over not doing crap for 3 WHOLE WEEKS (oh the guilt of actually taking time off). The whiny self pity part is well, pathetic, but oh woe is me…as the song says: nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen…
Being apart from my kid is hard. In moments it’s fine, in moments when I can hear the ease of her smile through the phone and can tell things are better for her there. But other times I just feel like someone is endlessly hacking off a part of my body and they never finish. It’s just shit. And so I’m actively looking at the practical junk involved in moving back to be near her, of which there is a lot.
And somehow now that I’m not forcing myself to see Cancun as my future home sweet home I’m becoming more annoyed each moment with the crap I have to deal with here. Just today my list of annoyances involved the following:
– I had to run in the pot-holed street with my dog because there aren’t any large parks or open space areas where I can take him and get a long enough workout.
– During said run with the dog I picked up his poop and disposed of it in a proper garbage receptacle. This makes me weird. NO ONE ELSE DOES THIS. The streets are covered in dog poop and garbage.
– I went out for lunch to yet another mediocre restaurant. Why is it so hard to find a decent meal here?
– I had to deal with stupid idiotic Mexican bureaucracy today when I went to renew my immigration papers. First they tell me to pay a bunch of money, then after I pay it they tell me I didn’t need to pay it yet; I rushed around like a nut-job all morning and now I have to wait a week…meanwhile I can’t travel and all I want to do is catch the next plane out of here.
– It’s been raining a lot lately, and so the roads are falling to ruins again. Coming home tonight I realized that there are now car-sized potholes which have opened up just in the last 24 hours. And my husband wonders why the suspension on my car is in bad shape…
– I went to a friend’s house this evening, to do some work together, and where I parked it was evident that a recently-parked car had had it’s windows smashed. So I didn’t feel safe parking the car there. And she lives in a “nice” neighborhood…better than where I live, supposedly. And not only that when I got out of the car the sidewalk was so broken as to be hazardous and there was garbage everywhere.
– Oh and I almost got killed crossing the street today because in Mexico the idea that cars might stop for pedestrians is unheard of. And there’s basically no such thing as a pedestrian crossing signal. Pedestrians here are on their own, at the mercy of the cars bearing down on them, saved only by their ability to run…which brings me back to the fact that there’s no where good to run here.
I was reading one of the Cancun message boards the other day. And someone who used to be a friend, but who is now a sad memory, mentioned that she is trying to be more positive about Cancun. So why do all of us want to live somewhere where we have to TRY to be positive? It shouldn’t be work to like where you live. You shouldn’t have to pretend that a place is good or nice or decent to live in.
Of course tomorrow I’ll probably blog about how much I love the tropical light here, or the birds that sing outside my house every minute of every day, or about how great it is to not have a mortgage. But for now this sucks, Cancun sucks, and I’m a bitch.
January 18th, 2008 10:30
RiverGirl, thanks so much for being honest with your readers. Having vacationed for 7-plus years in CAncun, I can feel your pain and relate to it even if it is just for weeks at a time….
But tonight, Atlanta GA is expecting 1-to-3 inches of snow.
Consider that when things get tough!
Steve and Laurie Jones
Auburn, GA
January 18th, 2008 11:35
Steve – I know it, I’m sitting here in perfect weather about to go running in shorts and a t-shirt… When I woke up the birds were taunting the cats through the window and the sun was shining. I adore the weather here.
I should clarify for some readers that the hotel zone, which is what tourists mostly see, is not garbage-strewn. It’s just downtown that has a profound lack of public garbage cans.
January 18th, 2008 12:35
Rivergirl, I discuss the garbage situation in Cancun with my (college) students alot. I think it is a function of a society as their standard of living increases, so does their attention to things like garbage in the streets, overall appearqances of roads and buildings, and other nusiances. One thing we did see last year as we (my wife and I ) wander through Cancun is car washes! That is a first, and to me another sign that things are moving upward, if ever so slowly for the native Cancunians (is that a term?)
January 18th, 2008 13:15
Stephen – The correct term for someone from Cancun is Cancunense. And yes car washes are now big business here, there are 5 within walking distance of my house and this area is supposedly residential. I’m about the only person around here with a dirty car I think.
I think that the prevalence of garbage in the streets here is due to many factors. One is the upsurge in the amount of plastic getting used in packaging. This is a soda drinking country and plastic soda bottles account for a huge percentage of the garbage you see here.
But also public garbage cans are not common here. So even if people want to throw away their garbage when they are out in public it’s not easy to do so. Then of course there’s education, people grow up littering and don’t think about it much.
January 18th, 2008 19:27
Rivergirl, you sound just like me before we moved from right outside of NYC to the suburbs. Sometimes enough is enough. We worried about missing something about the old ‘hood, but about three weeks into living in the ‘burbs hubby woke up and said, “Can you believe we ever lived anywhere else?”
That’s not to say that we stayed like that… three years after living in the burbs we decided to move to Mexico, which is basically like our old neighborhood with better weather.
I only say this because sometimes a move is the salve your soul needs- it doesn’t have to be permanent.
January 19th, 2008 21:47
I don’t think you’re a bitch. I think you have the balls to say what you really feel. And so what if other people don’t agree with it. The same sorts of things peeve me off too. I won’t even get into how difficult it was to get through to the gas company (just making the damn phonecall), and the end result being that they OF COURSE did not show up. Unbelievable. At least back home you can actually bitch to a manager and get a free something out of it. And here I sit. No gas, and can’t get through to the company still because their phone lines just don’t feel like working.
January 20th, 2008 10:56
Don’t forget, my dear, that this is your blog and you can bitch about whatever you darn well please!
When all these petty annoyances (similar yet different from yours) started to color my entire life, that was when I decided to move back to the States. Of course, now I see these things as very minor, but not when I was living them every day. I now have a laundry list of reasons why life in the US sucks compared to Cancun. But that’s normal, I think.
But what really struck me about your post is how much you are missing your daughter. I can’t help but marvel at what a good mom you are, supporting her in going back to the US because it was best for her, yet at the same time knowing how much you’d miss her.
Perhaps life would be immensely more livable, daily annoyances be damned, if you were with or near her.
January 20th, 2008 11:22
Thanks for the support everyone! It means a lot to me. I think the essential truth is that I need to be near my daughter. And there will be stupid shit anywhere you live, but maybe you deal with it better when the fundamentals are in place to make you happy.
But the puzzle of figuring out how to move back, now that seems like a big deal to me…one thing at a time I guess.