Month(s) at a Glance

It’s been nearly 4 months since I last posted, and this already feels familiar. I’m thinking of my only other blog venture, when I was writing in El Salvador in 2008, and I went over 2 months of my 4 total without writing once. I’m not totally sure why it happens, but I do know that I’m a person who goes in cycles—with everything. I’ll work out for 2 months and start feeling healthy just in time to quit for a quarter of the year. I’ll read 4 novels in 3 weeks when I’m motivated, and then not pick up a novel for another 6 weeks. I’ll take a whole month to learn as much as I can and then lose the motivation for any and all “joy-learning.” So it is, it would seem, with writing.

My blog-writing was originally interrupted by…writing. I undertook a project writing a novel in a month. The idea was called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. The goal was 50,000 words, or approximately 175 pages, in “30 days of literary abandon.” And that’s how I’ll start this update, with a month-by-month glance of what’s happened since I last posted.

November—It was perhaps one of the most productive months that I’ve ever had, as I wrote the novel and read a few books along the way as well. I also finally got ahead in my class-planning and got a good feel for teaching my classes. What’s more, I made a couple of trips to the ocean on the weekends and stayed relatively cool under pressure the entire month. I don’t think that I got stressed throughout all that I was doing, although that may just be my revisionist-historian version.

At the end of the day, I didn’t quite get to 50k. I ended with 38,000 and some loose change, but I wasn’t totally disappointed. Part of the motivation to take on the project was to simply say “I once wrote a novel in a month.” But there was an idea for a book that I’ve had since I lived in Boston, and this was the motivation that I needed to get started. Unfortunately, my plans to return to the book have fared as well as my ability to write in my blog over the last couple months…

December—December was a big month for me. Not only did I get to travel home for some much-needed 1^st-world R and R, I also got to go to the beach multiple times and meet Ada in Oaxaca in time for New Year’s and my birthday. But if I’m going to keep the updates about my time in Mexico, I’ve got to go with the Christmas Posada.

It is apparently a yearly tradition for our university to have a Christmas parade, the goal of which is to raise funds, morale and support for our school. To do this, each department (students and professors alike) dress up and march through the streets throwing candy and leading everyone in town to the center, where there are a few presentations and songs and dances. In a heartwarming display of holiday cheer and festivity, the English department decided to dress up as….pirates. Complete with swords and treasure maps and our very own Mexican spirits (Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of Mezcal) in our plastic water bottles. Oh, and a pirate ship.

My office mate, Josh, and I were excited about the prospect of being in a parade, but neither of us is a big dresser-upper. One day while contemplating a low-effort costume, the idea struck me that perhaps we could be the pirate ship. It would add a new dimension to our department, and it was completely low-effort: a bandana for each of us and a huge, decorated cardboard box and we were in. We decided to put our coworker, Iris, on the design team, which is precisely where low-effort ended.

Iris is a talented and ambitious artist who loves dressing up for things. The results of her seriously awesome work are shown in the picture here. The frame was made out of bamboo, cut and lashed by her. The sides were drawn on the fly and the shape cut with an exacto-knife. What isn’t shown here is our mast, with a legit skull-and-crossbones sail. But it happened.

The rest of the night was awesome, and the parade and our costumes were big hits. We had something like 450 pictures (no exaggeration) taken of us with students that ran up to us after the show was over. When Josh and I ran to the bathroom, we temporarily left our pirate ship in the middle of the auditorium where the “closing ceremonies” took place. When we came back the ship was surrounded by punch-drinking locals, and kids were climbing in and out of it. We stood looking in from the doorway, and I asked Josh what we should do. “We leave it there,” he said, “because we’re rock stars.”

January—Coming back to school in January started with a bang. I went to the center of town on Friday of the first week back to buy tamales, my traditional Friday-morning breakfast. I was running late, and as I hustled to the bus stop in the center of town I realized that the bus had already been by and so I grabbed the next taxi. The taxi stopped in the middle of the street, and as I didn’t want to keep the oft-honking traffic waiting I jumped in the front seat despite the fact that the seat was as far forward as it could go.

With knees up by my chin and my backpack between my legs, I slammed the door shut as I wished the driver a good morning. I stopped short, though, because with the closing of the door I felt a sharp, painful bite on my inner thigh. I swore in alarm and readjusted my bag just enough to see the entire blade of my new steel paring knife sticking out of the bottom of my bag, an inch and a half of which was dripping freely with my blood. Blood was running on the seat and on the floor.

The driver wished me a good morning and asked where we were going. I told him I think we’re going to the hospital. He asked me to repeat myself, just a trace of panic in his voice. He seemed worried, but continued on his way to the clinic that we had a the university. I couldn't show him the wound or my blood because the seat was still jammed forward and I hadn't yet been able to adjust it. It wasn't until we saw Flor, our English Department secretary, that he saw the blood (there was a lot of it). When I showed Flor and told her to call my boss, he saw the blood and shouted what would translate to a 4-letter word. Leaving in a screech of tires, we made it to the university clinic in record time.

Long story short, I lost a fair amount of blood but got sewed up with 4 stitches. The coworkers who came to get me in the waiting room said that I looked pretty pale. When I stood on the scale to get weighed by a young nurse, I asked her how much I weighed in kilograms. 82, with your clothes, she said. Without clothes....mmm... She raised her eyebrows and smiled. The two doctors who had given me the stitches laughed aloud. That, apparently, brought the color back to my face.

February—I watched the Super Bowl at the beach, and until now haven’t been teaching much because the students are off for the semester break. But there’s still half the month to go, so maybe I’ll have more to write in a few days. Here’s hoping.