Home.

The fact of the matter is, we live in a world of contrasts and opposing forces. And so, with the feeling of being home also come the reminders that I really am not home. O sea, the homesickness.

But what is home? I don’t miss my Lexington Ave house. I don’t miss my street, or my town. Or my bedroom. What is it that I miss? What is this concept of “home” anyway? After lots of reflection and deliberation today, I discovered what it is that I miss.

Teasing.

Only. Girl. These two words sum up my life.

Having grown up with four brothers, I was never what you’d call a girly girl. “Playing” consisted of touch football in the backyard and “hanging out” consisted of four siblings ragging on whoever the unlucky one of the moment was. I miss being made fun of. I miss Conor constantly reminding me that “boys rule girls drool.” I miss being bombarded with “Molly, shouldn’t you be on a diet?” every time I reach for a snack. I miss talking smack, watching sports, and engaging in hilariously hostile banter with my siblings. Analyzing Jurassic Park (as the “movie that defined out generation”). Quoting Dumb and Dumber and Home Alone to no end. The list goes on.

(my brothers and me last Easter)

The pleasantries are getting old. The opening of doors. The cheek kisses as customary greetings. The utter politeness of everyone. Where are my friends, the ones with whom I can “kick it,” drink a beer with while doing homework, watch the Phillies game, curse at the TV, pretend we’re characters in Always Sunny?

T.I.M.

Maybe that’s why I had such a great time this past weekend in Mexico City at the game of the century (not really). America, the name of Mexico City’s soccer team vs. Chivas, the team from Guadalajara. One of the country’s greatest rivalries. The game ended 0-0, but I had a ball (pun not intended) sitting in the nosebleeds (literally the last row of the stadium), trying to learn the cheers, dancing to the chants, and just straight-up actin’ a fool.

(me and Beatriz)



W.I.A.

I also had a ball not being on a diet at the Cuernavaca Gastronomic Festival, with my Colombian friend Beatriz who visited from Mexico City where she is currently living.

(notice strategic placement of hands to cover up over-stuffed tummy)

I also ate an amazing sweet pink tamal (singular for tamales) tonight.



W.I.L.T.

Of course, I shall leave you with nothing other than a song called “Home,” which was my favorite song of Spring 2010 and is still high on my list of top-played on itunes. "Home is wherever I'm with you..." Well said, Edward Sharpe.



p.s. I am going to the beach for a week on Friday to get in touch with my inner-child again, spend all day in the ocean, catching sand crabs and chasing waves, growing freckles and naturally exfoliating in the sand. So pardon if I don't write for a while. I'll be in Campeche. Google it.

I stink at writing poetry...

...but boy am I good at spotting it.

As a former (still proud to call myself) English major, I have studied all kinds of literature. I enjoy poetry. ee cummings in particular. But I am horrible--absolutely terrible--at any attempts in creating it. I do, however create poetry in other ways.

Good poetry (in my opinion) invokes imagery. When I read a poem, I hardly ever understand it from start to finish. Poetic language can be very abstract. But the feeling of a poem is for me the ultimate goal, the end result. Think about music videos. Once you see the music video of a song you love, that images from the video will forever be engrained in your mind whenever you hear the song. Poetry is the same. It should invoke the senses, create certain images and still scenes in your head.

Lately I’ve been observing poetry in this sense. Backwards, if you will. I see a scene, and I think, well gosh darn that should be a poem. That may explain my love for photography.

For example, the first time I found myself trying to explain these sentiments, I was received with blank stares (explaining an abstract artistic concept in a foreign language is just as hard as it sounds!). I had climbed a small mountain in a quaint town called Tepoztlan, outside of Cuernavaca. I sat with my two friends, Laura the gringa, and Jorge, a Mexican, on a peak overlooking the town. Not another soul was near. Around us was pure silence, from far below we could hear the shouts of children playing, dogs barking, and cars honking in the town, but the sounds were as infinitesimal (high school vocab word, holler) as the images on a microscope slide. The sun was warm; the breeze was cool. The sky was clear and blue, and every so often a hawk would swoop overhead, in between distant peaks. We had brought a snack: beer and 2 small bags, of Cheetos and Doritos respectively. As I sat listening to the miniscule sounds, relishing the breeze and sun, and feasting on the breathtaking scenery, I couldn’t help but think that Cheetos were the most delicious thing in the world. That was my poem, and I struggled to try to explain it to my friends.









Most recently, as in yesterday, the poem I observed was the whiteboard in my classroom after class. I was cleaning up after the kids left, just about to erase the board, when I noticed how beautiful it was with the peculiar but revelatory set of words splattered like blue paint onto the surface. I didn’t have my camera with me, so I jotted down the words in my notebook in the exact same layout they were on the board. Try to picture the following smattering of words on a whiteboard, in this very layout:



Call me crazy, but that whiteboard was a poem to me.

I'll leave you with my favorite ee cummings poem, which is untitled:

"who are you,little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window;at the gold

of November sunset

(and feeling:that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)"

How I know I've been here for a while...

W.I.L.T.

I was in a Cranberries mood today. Do I have to justify it?

Sometimes when I'm listening to my ipod I like to pretend I'm watching a real life movie, and the soundtrack is whatever is playing. Go ahead and laugh. So the bus ride home tonight was entertaining, like a cool montage panning past Mexicans going about their daily post-work tasks (women getting their hair did, 4 men in sombreros talking about who-knows-what, families sitting on their stoops, dogs wandering in and out of internet cafes, individuals closing up their hamburgesa or torta stands, parents arriving home from work to kids etc.) with the Cranberries playing in the background. Awesome.

T.I.H.

No, not a typo. In this blogpost, the H stands for home. That's right, I am beginning to feel home here. Here are supporting ideas/moments:

1. getting into a heated argument with a cabbie over the cost of a ride

2. on the flip side, being able to wager easily for a favorable taxi price

3. having a heart to heart with the woman who works as caretaker of the property where I rent. We are past the awkward "hola"s and "hasta luego"s. I finally worked up the courage to break the ice and ask her where she lives and if she has a family. We ended talking for about 30 minutes about her son who is struggling with alcoholism and drug addiction and giving her so much grief.

4. recognizing neighbors, especially the ones across the street. They are a family and live on top of the corner store they own. They all take turns working shifts during the day, and I make purchases there frequently. We have entered the friendly-neighbor-phase. I chat with them, have learned most of their names, and always acknowledge them with a "bueno(a)s dias/tardes/noches" when I walk past them sitting on the stoop. They even helped me open a bottle of wine once.

5. feeling inclined to turn down invites. Since I am in a new place/home, I found myself accepting each invitation that came my way in the beginning, whether to make friends or to elude loneliness. I now feel perfectly comfortable saying "no" to some people.

6. having to jump through hoops to buy a plane ticket to Campeche (on the Gulf Coast of Mexico next to the Yucatan Peninsula) and finally succeeding. Everything in Mexico takes multiple attempts, so I successfully made a big Mexican purchase and feel more Mexican because of it. (Grammar aficionados, I know I repeated "Mexico" now 5 times in this paragraph, but T.I.M.!) One of the attempts even involved a trip to Mexico City. Ah well. (6 times)

7. Basketball! I've played twice, with one of my students. Anyone who knows my family knows that basketball is a custom of sorts, a christening for new places.

8. coincidences: I've been told they mean I'm on the right path in life.

a.) Today my "personal trainer" (I just joined a gym and I go after the morning rush when it's empty, so the owner has been taking me through personal workouts) and I had a conversation about how history is a story written by the victors, the vencedores. I told him about my Christopher Columbus beef, and he even used the word mentira (lie) when talking about the history curriculums used in schools. Sounds like a certain lesson plan from last week, no? My trainer must have read Zinn in Spanish.

b.) I ran into Laura, my gringa friend, and Jorge, a good Mexican friend, by accident at a cafe last week. In a new city, it's a great feeling to run into someone you know without planning it.

(shoutout to Mrs. Hughes, 7th grade, for teaching me how to outline)

9. being told that I am "different, or something" by a fellow UTEZ English teacher, upon long-windedly and excitedly telling him all about my Columbus lesson plan when I walked into the office to get a whiteboard marker in the middle of class.

10. (and I'll stop here) knowing where the best tortillas in the neighborhood can be bought, and which ones (the ones I had been buying) are "feas" (not good).

W.I.A.

I haven't posted a picture yet, so I'll leave you with this. Ceviche.


And this, just because the puppy is adorable. (Disclaimer, not my picture, belongs to a friend named Jaime, was taken in Coyoacan, the charming part of Mexico City where Frida and Diego lived)


p.s. I went to a lucha libre last weekend. If you don't know what it is, I highly suggest a google image or even youtube search.

This thing called teaching

After a brief intermission, I am back on the blog and underway with my regular teaching schedule. Although many wonderful things have happened since I last updated (before my computer broke), I want to forego all the travel-y, touristy stuff for now and write specifically about how my classes have gone this week.

Just to remind everyone, I am working at Universidad Tecnologica Emiliano Zapata. My students range in age from 17-26, plus an outlier in his 30s. I teach English to two advanced groups, on Monday and Tuesday respectively, and two intermediate groups, on Wednesday and Thursday respectively.

Here are some views of the campus (the UTEZ buildings are the close-by red ones):





I love all my classes. Each day has a totally different feel to it, but I leave the Univ. every day feeling revitalized and assured that both I and my students are learning. Yesterday and today I went to class a little irked, for no reason other than hormones or something, and experienced a complete 180 during class time, so that by the time I was leaving campus I felt on top of the world, albeit exhausted (teaching is EXHAUSTING! I appreciate that so much more now!). I guess it’s definitely better to be entering my work day bothered and leaving happy than reverse, right? That says to me that I am on the right path in life!

As part of the Fulbright program, we are supposed to teach culture of the United States in addition to the English language. So how we decided my schedule will work is that each month will have a different theme. Last month (although we only had one week of classes) was geography. This month is politics and history.

Last week I stumbled across a website while lesson planning: historyisaweapon.com. Here I discovered the full text (!) of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I decided to use chapter one, “Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress,” for this week’s lesson (I have been using the same material for each class during the week, and deviating slightly based on interest and skill level).

Sample lesson plan from yesterday

My Monday and Tuesday classes (advanced) were assigned to read chapter one for homework and this week we discussed the chapter in class. I hadn’t assigned my Wednesday class (yesterday) to read it for homework because they are intermediate and I knew it would be too challenging on their own. SO.

For homework everyone in class had written one page on any Mexican historical or political topic. I split them into pairs, had them exchange papers, read their partner’s, and then I had each pair come to the front of the classroom and explain what his or her partner wrote about. When they had done that, I drew attention to the topics they had written about: Mexican Independence, Mexican Revolution, various presidents, revolts and protests, etc. I asked them what the earliest topic was that we had covered, and when we concluded that Independence from Spain was the earliest, I pointed out that we had collectively ignored a whole epoch of history (before the European conquerors arrived). I then told them that the U.S. tends to do the same.

I proceeded to split them into new pairs and each pair was given a page that I had extracted from chapter one of Zinn (there were seven pages total that I printed). Each page was a compilation of blurbs and paragraphs on one specific topic covered in the chapter. I gave the class about 10 minutes to read their respective page, taking notes on the topic; there were many individual words that they didn’t understand, but I told them to read for the main ideas.

Each group then explained to the rest of the class what their page was about. These are what we concluded the seven topics were: Columbus and Spanish Kings/first sighting of American land; movement of Indians to North America over the Bering Strait; Iroquois society and lifestyle; Puritan/Indian warfare and disease; Columbus’ 2nd expedition to Haiti; Spaniards and Christianity in Hispaniola; and Pilgrims/Puritans’ murder of Indians and taking of land in New England.

As a class, our task was then to put the pages in chronological order, like a jigsaw puzzle, which required incorporation of speaking, debating, and discussion skills. It was a great exercise. They were each able to practice their reading and speaking. They also had practiced their writing for the homework assignment (though I rejected about 5 of them which were clearly taken from a website-written vocab and grammar better than even I could pull off). AND we were able to confront a complicated historical topic: treatment of indigenous peoples. I congratulated them at the end, writing the Zinn citation on the board, and explaining that it is a pretty radical book, and that many Americans don’t even read it because of the advanced writing and complicated topics. And they had just held a full-fledged discussion/lesson on it!

I felt great about the class! Next week I’ll be showing a movie in class. I would like to ask my blog readers for ideas for an American movie that depicts either a U.S. political or historical event. I want a good movie! One that represents/portrays a significant moment in American history or politics. I was initially thinking Forrest Gump because it shows many historical and cultural epochs, but I am open to suggestions. Suggest away!