For the last 2 weeks I’ve been wanting to go to Los de Pescado which is my favorite fish taco place in Cancun. So today, after a client meeting, hungry as a horse (well, as a pony) I twisted the already twisted arm of my husbandito and convinced him to meet me there for lunch.

I was nearby the restaurant. He was not. So I needed to wait for him. The place was PACKED, as it always is at lunchtime, so I also needed to wait for a table.

But us white girls are invisible dontcha know…one woman and her two kids pushed right past me and took the next available table, even though I was waiting for it. As I was just getting off my phone with the husbandito who was still 10 minutes away, and as she had two hungry kids, I just let it go.

I stood there waiting for the next table, politely, like a normal person. Then a guy comes along, with HIS two hungry kids, and he literally pushes me out of the way so he can enter the dining area of the restaurant. No tables are empty yet, but one is paying their check. He pushes past me, walks inside and then I hear him tell his kids (in Spanish of course) to run to the table and sit there as soon as the people there leave.

He’s in the restaurant, while I’m waiting by the door. I’m thinking that it’s impolite to enter until a table clears. And he’s going to get my table because I’m hanging back and being polite. And I start to feel the bile rising in my throat. I start getting mad. I start thinking that I’m not sticking up for myself. And then the guy leaves (I assume going back to the car) while his wife enters and begins to help her kids get seated at my table.

Then the waiter comes to me and asks if I’m waiting for a table and when I say that I am he goes and confronts the woman (who has no idea that her husband pushed in front of me). He tells her that I, all by my lonesome, am getting that table that her kids are already sitting at. She starts to argue. He tells her again that I’ve been waiting and that her husband jumped in front of me. She’s resistant (apparently HER husband wouldn’t do THAT).

But then the guy sitting at the next table, who’s been eying me like a piece of meat, jumps in and takes the waiter’s side and tells the woman that yes indeed her hubby was in the wrong and the table was really mine. So now I have two saviors, like it or not, and I get my table. (I did thank both of them, even the gawker.)

The waiter came over immediately and took my order and he brought the food about 1 minute before husbanito showed his face. The tacos were great, as always (though I wish they’d use better tortillas) and the service was quite good (even if some of the patrons were pushy). We enjoyed our meal and left a good tip.

I’m enjoying the internet more than ever. Over the years it’s gotten more human. There’s less need to be a geek in order to enjoy its riches. It’s growing up.

I joined Twitter a few months ago. And we had our over-Tweeted honeymoon phase. Then I backed off and found that it has true sustaining value for me. It’s a great source of news (if you follow those who publish news and not shit). And it’s a great way to keep up with the incidentals in my Twittering friends lives. They Tweet about going to the dentist, about the kid being sick, about the hangover, about the dog barfing on the bed. Just the kind of shit I’d want them to tell me about if I bothered to pick up the phone to call them. Follow me on Twitter or don’t.

Yesterday, without any thought, I joined Momentile. I joined because I like the name and because someone on Twitter offered me an invitation. I didn’t even know what it was, except that it had something to do with posting photos online. I’ve only posted two photos but already I feel I’ve found a new form of expression. I can post a photo there without explaining anything about it. It’s meaning and relevance are entirely up to the viewer. All pressure is off. Nice. Stalk me on Momentile or don’t.

Recently I’ve found some blogs that I’m really enjoying. This is largely due to things I’ve seen Re-Tweeted Twitter.

Cake Wrecks – This is a blog that I won’t explain except to say that there’s a picture of a cake in every post. I find this blog to be a lovely vacation from all those blogs that think they matter. And I like looking at pictures of cake wrecks.

Margaret and Helen – Their tag-line is Best Friends for Sixty Years and Counting… I love their politics and I love the way they write. I hope I’m that out-spoken when I get to be that age.

Flowing Data – I like this blog, if you can call it that, because it makes me feel smart. I worked for years for a company where part of my job was to take data sets and make them both interesting to look at and useful for making sound business decisions. Those fucks laid me off, but I still get off on visualizing data-sets.

Clusterfook – This is the personal blog of Lisa Kelly who is a cancer ninja. She’s detailed her battle with ovarian cancer in her blog and she’s currently in hospice care. She’s a great writer and has taught me a lot about having a proper attitude toward life and death. She’s a star.

Enjoy the Internets all.

It’s a bit chilly in Cancun and here I sit in a house with no heater. I’ve been wearing jeans and long sleeves and have been thanking myself for dragging all those sweaters to Mexico because I’m using them.

I took a run today in the Parque Kabah and it was just like a nice crisp September day in Colorado. A hint of winter in the air, a gorgeous blue sky above with the sun out. It was perfect workout weather and I celebrated by doing extra stretches and extra sit-ups (I just wrote that to make you groan, I’m weird because I actually like sit-ups).

The other day I signed up for a Flash development class. I have skill with Flash now but have been feeling for a while that I need to deepen my knowledge. So today I did a dumb thing, today I logged in to the online classroom and got the reading assignment for the first week of class.

I think the teacher assigned almost 200 pages just for the FIRST WEEK, 200 technical pages, 200 pages full of programming examples and tech talk. I think I’m going to just roll over and die now. I’ve studied with this teacher before, and I know I have an aptitude for Flash, but 200 pages is going to KILL ME!

I suppose that if I get really frustrated with the Flash class I can just burn the book. It’s a big book, it might keep me warm for a whole hour!

I’m proud to finally launch the RAP Cancun Animal Rescue web site.

For those that don’t know, Cancun has a very serious problem with strays cats and dogs. In some parts of the city you see multiple street animals in a single block. The city of Cancun has few resources to combat the problem and doesn’t even have the money to humanely euthanize animals (from what I understand they electrocute the animals they catch).

RAP is working on the front-line to save street animals, to rehabilitate them and then help them find healthy, loving homes. RAP is also working hard to educate and support pet owners so that they understand how important it is to sterilize their pets.

Please visit the site, subscribe to the RSS Feed: http://rapanimalrescue.org/feed/ and, most importantly, please make a PayPal donation. RAP needs all the help we can give. I’ll keep you updated as I make changes and upgrades to the site.

My previous posts about RAP:

• Rescued Puppy
• How Can You Resist Puppies?
• Helping Cancun’s Animals

I’ve noticed an interesting thing.

Lately a number of friends and family members who reside in the U.S. (none of whom have ever lived in Mexico) have told me “things are really bad here, stay in Mexico, don’t move back here, you are better off there.” They have a point. From here I can see how badly the economy is doing there. My prospects for finding a job in the U.S. right now are poor but I would need one to be able to afford to live there. But here in Mexico I live debt-free, on very little. We are financially stable here, my business is doing well enough to support me here and my husband has the kind of job you almost can’t get fired from (he’s works for the Federal Government). So there is a lot to be said for staying put in Mexico for a while.

But I also have a number of American friends who I met while they were living in Cancun, and who have recently returned to live in the U.S. Each one of them has been VERY HAPPY with their decision to leave Mexico and almost without exception each one of them has told me they will help me move my shit when I’m ready to move back. These friends are happy to be back in the U.S. despite the problems there. These friends understand just how difficult it is to live in Cancun. And these friends are willing to make an effort to help me move back to the U.S., that really says something important to me. It tells me that even with all the problems present in the U.S. it’s still an easier, and probably healthier, place to live than Cancun is.

The reality is that we will be in Mexico for a while yet. But I know who to call when I need help moving…

I’m not particularly religious. To be more accurate I should say I’m an atheist who gets an occasional case of spiritual hiccups. And because I don’t live my life having much personal interaction with organized religion I haven’t ever looked at the effect that organized religions have had on the cultures I’ve interacted with and lived in. Until now.

When I moved to Mexico I knew it was a Catholic country. I knew it was the most Catholic country in the world (it has the highest number of Catholics as a percentage of the population of any country). But what I didn’t know what was how all that widespread Catholicism would effect the culture or the way people in Mexico learn to think.

I also didn’t understand just how much I was myself a product of a predominantly Protestant culture. I didn’t understand that even though I wasn’t raised a Protestant that I was still formed by a Protestant culture.

But living in Mexico and being married to a Mexican man (himself an atheist who was brought up loosely Catholic) has given me insight into just how strong a role religious ideals do play in the formation of culture and in the way we are brought up to think.

There are specific examples that jump out at me. One is the sense that I and many of my fellow (largely Protestant) Americans have that we are masters of our own destiny. I absolutely believe that ultimately I can and should try to control most major and nearly all minor aspects of my life. I plan and I plan and I plot and I worry and I guess and I wait for my future. My husband doesn’t. My husband often seems, from my perspective, to not even see how the choices he makes form the future he will live. And he hates to plan anything, just in case he might not want to actually do that thing when the time comes.

I think that Americans in general are seen by many as arrogant, pushy and dominant. And I think that it comes directly from that thing in our Protestant culture that tells us we can make things happen, that we can and should use the power we have to influence our lives and the world around us. And often I think we Americans use our power too freely and try to influence others too strongly. We are arrogant bastards. But we believe and know that we can control our lives. We are also organized enough, and plan well enough, that we can and do have a very strong influence on the world around us.

Mexicans, with my husband usually among them, often don’t seem to believe that they can change anything. They seem resigned to take what God gives them. They accept their fate much, much better than I ever could. They are a people who epitomize patience.

In fact patience is the number one thing that I have learned from living in Mexico. I’ve learned to be patient with others’ incompetence. I’ve learned to be patient with the lack of logical thinking present in everything here from the way people drive to the way they manage businesses to the way the government works. And I’m grateful to have learned patience. It was about time.

But to me there’s something tragic about the way that most Mexicans just accept that drug violence and corruption and environmental destruction and exploding populations of street animals are normal aspects of daily life. People in Mexico largely just accept those horrors and get on with their days. I’m constantly amazed at how happy people seem to be as they drive past a dying dog in the street and around a pile of garbage.

I’ve lived in Mexico for over 5 years. And I’ve learned that I’m never going to accept that the horrors here can’t be changed. I will never be able to see a newly beheaded body on the front page of the paper and just say ni modo (which loosely means “I don’t like it but whatever,” ) and move on about my day. I will never be able to feel that it’s “right” to bribe a cop. I will never be able to understand why people here can’t put their garbage in a trash can. I will never accept these things because I’m not made that way. I’m not made to accept tragedy and corruption and suffering. I’m a master of my own destiny remember, so when I see all that horror I feel I’ve got to change it and to fix it.

It’s my hope that Mexico will someday learn to respect its land and its animals and its people so that people here don’t have to ignore so much suffering just to be happy. Maybe someday Mexicans will be able to have faith in their own ability to make things better. Until then I guess it’s good that they are patient people.

The illustrious Isla Gringo will no doubt be miffed at me for this because I went to Isla Mujeres recently and didn’t tell him I was coming (sorry baby). But it was the last day of my daughter’s visit and we didn’t plan at all, just got up and on the ferry.

Anyway. One of the first things we did when we landed on Isla Mujeres was to spend a few minutes wandering in the cemetery on the north side of town. Despite the fact that I really, really do not want to be buried I actually like cemeteries.

And Mexican cemeteries are really special I think because they are so colorful and busy. As you can see from the photos below the Isla Mujeres cemetery is packed tight with lots of small above ground crypts (I guess that’s what you’d call them anyway).

It’s hard to walk around in there because the graves are just inches apart. But I really enjoy all the colors and all the different decorations that people put on the graves. We saw crypts painted in all colors. We saw some that were covered in floor or wall tiles. Some of the lower-rent graves were just concrete block with no stucco and no paint. Most of the crypts we saw seemed to be homemade. And not once did I see what we Americans would call a “normal” gravestone.

On many graves we saw evidence of offerings for the dead one. Flowers were common but so were other items that I guessed were things that deceased person had loved during life. On one grave we saw an altar with various plastic foods (truly unappetizing), an empty wine bottle (with cork in place), a plastic motorcycle and some laminated scratched off lottery tickets.

The grave in the photo below, I believe, belonged to a young boy. It was adorned with all kinds of plastic and rubber creepy bugs and spiders and alligators and turtles. It also had a half full bottle of soda and a half full bottle of Bevi which I think is chocolate milk. Everything a young boy could want in the afterlife.

I look forward to poking my head into other Mexican cemeteries in my future travels.

I feel I should write a post that ushers in the New Year and dismisses the Old Year, or something. So here goes.

I began 2008 with a lot more money in the bank than I ended it with. I’m a long-term investor so I’m not very bent out of shape about it, it will come back, but I did like having more money.

When the year began the exchange rate between the Mexican Peso and the U.S. Dollar was such that our house was worth more than twice what we originally paid for it (in Dollars). At year end our house is worth quite a bit less in Dollars, though still more than we paid for it. That’s frustrating. So now I’m really rooting for the Peso to gain strength against the Dollar again. Go Peso!

I began 2008 thinking that selling real estate in Mexico was something I might be good at. By May I’d been stabbed in the back on two big deals and had come to believe that if you lie down with wolves you might not get back up again. I love looking at real estate and have a strong understanding of real estate investing, so I may still help my friends find places to buy, but I’ve learned that I have to keep it light and not think of it as my work.

In 2008 my web design business made more money than ever before. I learned to be more efficient. I got faster and more importantly, I grew more realistic about what I can do for clients.

In 2008 I missed my kid way too much. As one friend told me recently “it makes you old before your time to live away from your kids.” I was happy to see her at both Thanksgiving (In November) and at Christmas, so we ended the year very close. But it still rots not to live with her.

We began 2008 with 10 cats and 1 dog. We ended with 8 cats and 2 dogs. Overall the house is happier with 2 dogs in it. But we still miss the two cats that died, one of them left a sister-cat who still cries for her, the other left his mama who isn’t close to any other kitties.

I’m not one for making lots of New Year’s Resolutions because I think it sets one up to fail. But there are several things I want and need to change this year. My one Resolution is to stop working on weekends. And I think if I stop working weekends I will automagically change other things that need to change because I will be taking more time for me and will be less stressed.

Here’s wishing you all a happy, fruitful 2009!