« September 2005 | Main | November 2005 »
October 28, 2005
20 Days
Two days of driving brought us to southern Illinois, where I will leave my car at my parents' house.
Along the way, we heard this story on All Things Considered, and it just made me more embarrassed about my country's behavior in the world arena.
Posted by crispy at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2005
Adrift
Losing home is like a bullet in your heart.
All our things are packed and in storage. Because we're in a place where people will be staying after us, there is still furniture, cooking equipment and a few books, but all the things that have made this building our home for the past 12 years are hibernating until they see the light of day again in Mexico.
So barren is the house that last night I had a hard time getting to sleep, even after being up for 40 hours straight packing and moving our things. Where there used to be the soft gurgle of a fishtank and the warm glow of my Virgen de Guadalupe night light there is now only absolute silence and darkness. In that void, it feels like I've died and come back as a ghost to haunt whoever will next inhabit this place. Driving around town, I feel like a visitor who has returned to his home town to see that everything has changed, as if all the new development of new buildings and the demise of my favorite haunts were sudden rather than happening over the past decade.
It's true. You can't go home again. Sometimes it seems like a myth that you were ever there in the first place.
Miss Liberty tells me Aztlan's gone. As if I didn't know that, as if I didn't know my own back yard.
Now I start to notice that my perception of myself must change. Since coming to live in the southwestern United States, I have felt deeply a unity with this place, less this arctic fringe than the parched desert, but all the same, I have not only been an "American," but very specifically one of those in the frontier. In Los Angeles, you feel as if you might as well be in Mexico, but even so, it's still the frontier of Mexico. For many years I've lived in a Mexican territory, because this area has been shaped by the influence of its once being a part of Mexico, and before that, the land of the people that didn't have to deal with that scar of a river cutting us into two countries.
I've realized that I'm not only crossing the border, but I'm leaving that border region behind to go deep into the interior. I'll no longer be a self-declared Chicano but merely a gringo. I can no longer feel like I'm in the set of a people who have gotten with the times and speak English and Spanish because those are our languages that we speak here. I'm an expatriat that manages to eek out a few phrases in order to survive. My perspective on this place will be so different now. I'll see the border not as the southwest but as the north. I'll be on el otro lado.
And I'm trying to get back to a place I've never been. I'm trying to cross over.
No longer will the Mexico I live in be the mesquite smoke and adobe of Santa Fe, the saquaros of Tucson, the missions of California. In leaving the southwest, I am also leaving behind a certain cultural Mexico that is completely foreign to Guadalajara. I'll be leaving behind the cradle that not only holds El Paso, Nogales and San Diego, but also Chihuahua, Hermosillo and Tijuana.
I'd never thought of that before, until now. I'm already leaving what is to me a part of Mexico for another, and for the first time, I realize how much I'll miss her.
Eleven generations, she's lived there. It's the just land and name that's changed its borders.
Lyrics: El Vez, Aztlan, from the album "Graciasland"
Posted by crispy at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2005
25 Days
The lesser grain borer beetle, one of the smallest and most destructive beetles infesting grain in North America, grows from an egg to an adult in 25 days. In the same amount of time, Shawn and I will have gone from living our relatively opulent lives in Boulder to living out of a couple of suitcases and sleeping on a bus.
The adventure awaits, but it seems so distant. It doesn't help that today is our last day of packing, so things are strewn all over the house. After we move it all to storage tomorrow, I think we will feel like we're living in what is only the husk of our former lives.
One positive aspect of our hurried schedule is that I've not had much time to be sad about going. While I look forward to waking up one February morning and looking out the window onto a sunny, 80-degree day, right now the thought leaving friends behind is sad. And despite the best intentions that everyone has to stay in touch, you know that you'll lose a few along the way. Which friends will we never see again? It's strange to walk through the moments that you suspect in the future might be your enduring memories of a place, the way it feels, the people that populate it. It feels like you should be paying so much more attention to all the details. You catch yourself immediately after the moment regretting that you didn't make more of it.
At 25 days left in the United States, that is how it feels. Like I'm living not in the present, but in what are already memories of a very significant time in my life: my last days as an "American."
Posted by crispy at 03:49 AM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2005
Wilma Strikes Yucatán
From NOAA Significant Event Images web site.
Posted by crispy at 12:23 AM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2005
Everything In Its Right Place
While some aspects of our preparations are in utter chaos, others are starting to come together just as planned.
While our house still looks like it was hit by a tornado, with stacks of half-full boxes piled in every available cranny, today I received two important packages in the mail: a replacement part for my soda siphon that I've been missing for years and a box full of clothes with the newly selected uniform, appropriate for Latin America. Unlike the jeans and t-shirt look that has served me well for so many years, the new ensemble is more like that of the Blues Brothers, sans sunglasses and jacket.
I also picked up my car today, which I had taken to the body shop to have fixed. Over a year ago, I was rear-ended and I figured I'd better take care of the damage before retiring the car to Illinois or I'd never get it fixed. Besides, my ability to claim it on my insurance would expire in April. But it looks beautiful again. There will be times when I really miss that car, but I just don't think it's a good idea to have it in Mexico. At least not yet.
The majority of my kitchen tools have been packed, apart from the things I will be using before we go. But the vacuum sealer, decorative peelers, Silpat sheets, pastry bags and tips...all have been boxed up. It will be interesting to see just how much I've come to depend on such things once we get an apartment and I don't have them with me. I feel like I'll be "getting back to basics" as I will only have things like a cutting board and a sole kitchen knife at first.
Ah but for now, it's back to packing away the old life to get to the new.
Posted by crispy at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2005
Packing
Shawn nears the breaking point as he sorts through twelve years of accumulated stuff.
With the house so cluttered with things to be sorted through, one can barely walk around. We have packed over 30 boxes of books, 3 boxes of DVDs and a few boxes of miscellaneous other items, but much remains to be reckoned with, as the photograph shows. This is a very educational experience for us, although we never seem to learn the lesson: DON'T COLLECT THINGS.
We have already started to think that perhaps in searching for an apartment in Guadalajara, we should not only get a guest bedroom, but also another room to store all this stuff. I almost feel like we should have an open house and let people in to pick over things and take what they want, like in that story by Bukowski where he lets all the neighbors take things they like from his recently deceased father's house.
Leave the whisky.
We have eight days left in our planned packing schedule, and hopefully at the end of those eight days we will have everything moved into a storage unit, packed to take with us, or packed to be freighted to us after we get an address. Then we go to Olney, Illinois (where my folks live) to drop off my car. We hope to return on Halloween, and as we depart on the 3rd of November, we'll have a couple of days to finish anything left, if we need it.
Posted by crispy at 01:57 AM | Comments (1)
October 11, 2005
The Going Gets Tough
While we've read countless places that Americans live on FMT visas (the simple tourist kind that allows you to be in Mexico for 180 days at a time), leaving the country to renew them as necessary, recent reports from a new online acquaintance who lives in Guadalajara claim that we will need the official FM3 visas (for longer stays) to get such things as utilities, bank accounts and health insurance.
This is a real drag because the requirements for that type of visa is much more stringent and not something we can come up with easily. While Shawn would get one if he ends up getting this job he wants with Hewlett-Packard in Guadalajara, it's much more difficult for me since I don't have obvious and easily demonstrated income. In any case, it's not something that we're going to be able to get before we go.
We read up on the gritty details of what we need and decided that we should consult with a lawyer about it. I sent an email, but so far today there has been no response. I think I may whip up a brief letter and FedEx it to her, just to cover all the bases. Hopefully she will be able to suggest some alternatives for us; I'm starting to fear that we'll be living in an apartment with no electricity, gas or water.
On the positive side, the same online acquaintance gave me a pointer for finding apartments online in advance. El Informador has classified ads online that you can access by clicking on "Alquileres Departamentos." This has been very encouraging, as they list two bedroom apartments for $400-$550 USD and entire condominiums for only $600 USD per month in the section of town we like. Of course, we won't do any actual apartment hunting until we arrive, but it's reassuring to be able to look at the listings and see that they're available and cheap.
But for now, it's back to packing. Our train pulls out on 3 November, and we've got to be all boxed up and stored away in Colorado before then.
Posted by crispy at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)
October 04, 2005
Record Number of Deaths in Border Crossing Attempts
U.S. Customs has released figures that show at least 464 people have died between 1 January and 30 September of this year attempting to cross the border from Mexico to the United States. This record number, a 43% increase over the previous year, is suspected to be due to extremely high temperatures in June and July, but a new, more accurate reporting system along the Arizona section of the border is also believed to have raised the numbers from last year.
Posted by crispy at 08:09 PM | Comments (0)
From Our Guadalajara Scouting Mission
In December of 2004, Shawn and I traveled via bus to Guadalajara to check it out and see if it was right for us.
I have added a rather clunky online album of photographs from that trip to my web site so that you can look at our newfound home as we saw it.
http://www.crispy.com/exhibits/guadalajara/
Posted by crispy at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
The Big Adiós Photos
We had a combination wedding reception for our western friends and going away party on 1 October 2005 at Tamayo in Denver. The food was great, the mariachi was hot, and a grand time was had by all.
To see Shawn's photos from the event, check out our online album.
Posted by crispy at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)
October 01, 2005
"Bordertown" to Address Rash of Murders on Border
Director Gregory Nava's upcoming film "Bordertown" will deal with the unsolved murders of hundreds of women in border towns over the past year. Jenifer Lopez will star as a Chicago Sentiel reporter sent to investigate the killings in Ciudad Juarez but ends up in danger herself. The picture will also feature Antonio Banderas.
Posted by crispy at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)