I’m kind of a Wikipedia junkie, I even use Wikipedia as a verb, as in “Hang on a sec, I’ll Wikipedia that”. Today I came across the Wikipedia article traffic statistics page, which provides information about how often different Wikipedia pages are viewed. But most interesting to me was the list of the most viewed pages.

In the month of February 2008 the most viewed normal page (not the home page or a search page) was, not surprisingly, a page titled “Valentine’s_Day”, at number 6. It was viewed 2,368,531 times during the month (well, the majority of views were on February 14).

The next most viewed normal page, at number 7, was the “Barack_Obama” page, which was viewed 2,625,243 times during February. That’s a lot of interest, in fact it’s more than 90,000 views per day.

Number 9 was “John_McCain” which was viewed 1,614,941 times (that’s more than 1 million fewer viewings than Barack’s page had).

I got curious about where Hillary Clinton’s page was in the list, I started scrolling down and didn’t see her name. So I used the browser’s search function and found her down the page at #77. The “Hillary_Clinton” page was viewed 646,899 times in February (that’s almost 2 million fewer viewings than Barack’s page).

In fact, in February there were a whole slew of things that Wikipedia users read about more often than they read Hillary’s page, including:

Sex at #13
Zacarias_Moussaoui at #20
Amy_Winehouse at #39
Canada at #46
Lost_(TV_series) at #32
Global_warming at #51
Abraham_Lincoln at #54
United_Kingdom at #55
Scientology at #56
George_W._Bush at #63

I’m not sure what all of this means, but I must say it didn’t surprise me. I find Lost and Global Warming and Sex and Abraham Lincoln all to be more interesting than I do Hillary Clinton. Not that I won’t vote for her if she gets the nomination, I will, but she simply doesn’t interest me.

Barack Obama on the other hand does interest me. In fact I’ve subscribed to his web site’s RSS feed, so I can stay up to date on whatever his camp is up to. And I find myself visiting the Barack Obama web site pretty often (it’s a well designed site with nice graphics and I like looking at it). I guess I’ve become a Barack Obama junkie as well.

I’ve got a U.S. phone line that rings here in Cancun. It’s very cool and helps me appear like I’m in the states when I’m not. Heehee. Well, anyway I basically never get any random sales-like calls on that number. But in the last 2 weeks I’ve gotten 3 phone calls from people in the Barack Obama camp who are just calling registered Democrats to make sure we aren’t going to support that grumpy goat who should have divorced Mr. Bill ages ago. I didn’t say that. No.

So the two candidates that I actually agreed on the most issues with are both out of the race now. One of them was even MORE QUALIFIED to run the country than any of these other people (AND he had a better web site too). But he’s gone. And so every time one of these members of the Obama fan club calls I tell him (all have been hims) “yes, yes, yes, of course O-ba-ma!”.

I even registered with Democrats Abroad so I can vote online for O-ba-ma in the primary and everything.

Here in Cancun we are about to have local elections. In my hood it looks like the PRI party is going to win. More than half my neighbors have PRI stickers on their cars and PRI flags flying from the door-cracks of their cars.

The recent uproar among tourists here stems from worry over the fact that Cancun will have an almost 36 hour dry law in effect for the election. And that dry spell will cover the SuperBowl. Horrors. Can’t watch the SuperBowl without booze. Christ. I don’t even know who’s playing and I don’t care. Quarterbacks sometimes have cute butts but that is ALL I know about football. So the tourists can run to WalMart and buy booze for the SuperBowl. And I’ll sit home and watch the pirate copy of the DaVinci Code that my husband borrowed from someone at work.

Like I said before “I am not a junkie”, so I can NOT watch the SuperBowl with no booze! Whoohoo!

Ok, so I didn’t really GO to high school very much. In fact my high school career consisted of attending 9th grade and the second half of 10th grade. (I transcended the first half of 10th grade, thanks for asking.) Then I went to college (which, to be absolutely honest, saved me from running off to become a circus clown).

Somehow, I think by simply not being there for high school, I missed learning about a whole bunch of stuff which I think of as the “politics of female friendship”. The friends I had in my brief high school career were either male or serious intellectual females who didn’t fit into the regular high school population, and who didn’t have any idea about the “politics of female friendship” either.

Then when I got to college everyone was an intellectual, and the women there were so concerned with their studies and with issues like environmental destruction, or human rights abuses, or how idiotic the government was being, that they didn’t engage very much in the “politics of female friendship”.

After college I got involved in the male-dominated computer industry and started, or worked for, a series of small computer and internet-based companies. And the very few female friends I had then, for whatever reason, didn’t engage much in the “politics of female friendship”.

The result of all this is that I never learned how to navigate the tricky waters of things like what to do when one friend tells you that another one was saying nasty things about you behind your back. Or what to do when the secrets you tell one person come back to you from someone else.

Now, in one sense, I do know what to do, I should ignore it and keep my brain occupied with intellectual pursuits. Or I should turn my attention to simpler friendships (ones with men and with women who are too occupied for this stuff) where these issues don’t arise.

But since coming here to Cancun I’ve found that the closeness of the female ex-pat community can be my biggest comfort. Female ex-pats stick together and the women I’ve become close to here give me a sense of belonging that I’m not sure I’ve ever had before.

So I’m taking a crash course in the “politics of female friendship”, but I’m flunking! I’m flunking badly and I’m seriously considering dropping out of the class altogether.

I might get into trouble somewhere down the road for saying this but it seems really hypocritical and unethical to me that the U.S. gives Cubans the right to stay in the country legally when they enter the U.S. illegally!

The U.S. has a wet-foot-dry-foot law which effectively means that if a Cuban shows up on land (with dry feet) in the States, he or she can apply for permanent residency and it will be granted. It doesn’t matter if that Cuban enters the U.S. illegally.

But how, praytell, does a Cuban get into the U.S. and onto dry land in the first place?

Well, they sometimes take a life-threatening journey in a rickety piece-of-shit raft, right? We’ve all heard the stories.

And the other common way that Cubans get into the U.S. is to get smuggled through Mexico and into the U.S. over land. Which of course provides business to the many human smuggling rings which operate in Mexico.

I’ve read that the price to smuggle someone from Cuba into the U.S. is $10,000 usd per person, but I’ve heard whispers that there was a recent price increase due to tightening of the U.S border.

Now I’m not going to give an opinion on Castro or his regime or Communism or any of that. But if the U.S. wants to help the Cubans it should ensure safe passage for them.

But instead, through it’s wet-foot-dry-foot policy, the U.S. encourages unsafe passage and illegal human smuggling.

And when a Cuban immigrant is smuggled through Mexico who do you think pays the fee for their passage? That Cuban can’t pay his (or her) own way out of Cuba, if he could afford that he could buy a plane ticket and leave Cuba on his own. So relatives living in the U.S. are the ones who are likely to pay for Cubans to be smuggled through Mexico. Which means that part of the money earned in the U.S., part of the U.S. economy, is supporting these human smugglers. Surely our lawmakers didn’t mean for this to be the case, but that’s what it is.

To me you either help people or you don’t! You either fight illegal immigration or you don’t! You either fight human trafficking or you don’t!

But you don’t dangle the promise of permanent residency regardless of how they get there. You don’t encourage people to risk their lives at sea. And you don’t encourage human smugglers.

I just came across a decent English translation of the Mexican Constitution:

- Mexican Constitution - In English

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.

My kid is home from school today because today is the day Mexicans celebrate the start of the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican Revolution gave rise to Mexico’s present-day Constitution which among other things is supposed to:

• Limit the work day to 8 hours. My husband’s shift today as a Federal Agent with Immigration is officially from 7 am to 7 pm, last time I checked that was 50% more than 8 hours! Last Saturday he worked from 7 am to 10 pm which is normal during tourist season (we have about 8 months a year that are considered “tourist season” here). So much for an 8-hour workday, not even government employees enjoy that one.
• Establish a Minimum Wage. Well, it did do that but the minimum wage is so low that you cannot possibly live on it no matter how frugal you are unless you live in a shack and eat nothing but rice and beans (which is exactly what a lot of people in this country do).
• Limit Child Labor. I don’t know what the limits are but when I go to the grocery store a child younger than my daughter bags my groceries. I always want to tell them to go home and study and that I’ll bag my own groceries, but instead I tip them well and thank them and put up with it.
• Restrict Property Ownership by Foreigners. But of course the foreigners have found all manner of ways to get around this one and are now busy buying the coastline from the tip of Yucatan down to the Belize border. Personally I disagree with this restriction anyway, but it certainly isn’t working the way it was intended to.

I have read in numerous places that the Mexican Revolution killed about 1 million people, which was 10% of the country’s population at the time (no wonder people here have so many children). I’ve also read that about 900,000 Mexicans fled to the U.S. during the Mexican Revolution. I can’t imagine the emotional wreck this country must have been after the war ended and roughly 20% of it’s population was either dead or gone to Gringolandia.

So today we celebrate. Well, I’ve celebrated already by sleeping late. I cherish those days when I am not forced out of bed at the crack of dawn. Further celebratory plans include possibly hitting a matinee with said kiddo and having a nice café con leche (oh, I forgot, I would do that anyway). Then I plan to work, work, work for the rest of the day (oh yeah, I would do that anyway too).

In the spirit of celebration I will offer up the below photo of a Mexican Christmas ornament which someone gave me. Incidentally we’ve already put up our Christmas tree, probably ensuring that we’ll be completely sick of Christmas by the time it actually arrives. But I just got the bug the other day and had to put it up. My husband now thinks I’m crazy and tells me so every time he sees the tree (but he secretly loves it).

Here is a decent (but long) article about the Mexican Revolution:
Encarta’s Article: Mexican Revolution

Here’s a much shorter (and less thorough) synopsis of the Mexican Revolution:
MexOnline’s Article: Mexican Revolution

Check out Miniature Earth, it’s a Flash movie that takes an interesting look at the world’s population. Sniffle, sniffle.

Ok, so a couple of interesting tidbits have come my way today. First, I saw this great video of Keith Olbermann criticizing The Shrub, that moron currently residing in the Casa Blanca.

And then I happened upon this sample U.S. Citizenship Test. And, well, I just wonder whether old Georgie would actually pass this test himself?? Me thinks not.

Go Keith!