Alive and Kicking

Honestly, I post to my blog every day... um... in my head. It's just not been getting relayed to my keyboard, that's all. So let's see if I can play catsup... um, I mean ketchup... doh!... I mean catch-up.

If we were playing the game show Jeopardy, you'd be presented with the following categories:

1) Heat
2) Relief
3) Parasites

But this ain't Jeopardy, so you don't have to phrase the answers as questions, and you don't have to choose just one category. That's right, you get all three! So, let's get started...

Heat (early May)
While the Yucatan Peninsula was still hotter than HellitSelf, my adventurous Aunt Sue came for a visit from California. This is the same Aunt Sue with whom I drove to Alaska in 2003. Here, HEAT was the adventure: along with eight other hearty souls, and one knowledgeable, multilingual tour guide/van driver, we spent a sunny afternoon in Uxmal. I've honestly never been so hot in all my life; it was nearly religious, that heat.

Call it an authentic context for a visit to the most baroque of the Mayan ruins. We survived the afternoon and took in an evening of "Luz y Sonido," the light-and-sound show that helps you imagine the soap-opera version of what might have happened at Uxmal hundreds of years ago: power, love, jealousy, revenge, murder... like that. The lighting made for particularly cool photos. (See more Uxmal photos here.)

Relief (mid-May)
The terrible heat I described in my last posting soon gave way to the rains, by the way. So now it's hot, for sure, but much less overwhelming than it was in May. Even so, sweat running down your back is a daily experience.

But I think I'm just a lucky person. And so it is that I met J. She's Belgian, she's Californian, she's an ESL teacher, and she's a passionate citizen of the world. We get along swimmingly, and not just because J happens to have a pool.

Typically, I come over for a swim while J is tutoring her students-- sometimes she's teaching French, other times English, occasionally Spanish. Many of her students are Korean, as there's a sizeable Korean community here-- both Koreans from Korea and what I will call YuKoreans-- Yucatecans of Korean ethnicity whose great-grandparents immigrated from Korea to the Yucatan Peninsula in the early 1900's. (More on this in a future posting.)

English as a Second Language has never been so interesting as at J's house-- when I come up for breath, I hear two, three and sometimes four languages being tossed about like juggling pins. J's students adore her, such that they often bring her breakfast, the newspaper, or some other kind of goody. Generosity is contagious.

Meanwhile, I'm in charge of swimming and petting the cat-- usually not at the same time. Everyone wins! The friendship and the daily exercise have brought me a fair dose of that elusive "Merida magic" that so many rave about. Which is a good thing, given that I've also encountered...

Parasites
Parasaites are effective. And rather than choosing a photo that illustrates this fact (er... thanks KAT), I've chosen to share this one of me drinking from a communal cup at a market in Oaxaca. That was back in April.

Now, I'm not saying that this was the source of my parasites, but I will posit that these kinds of activities-- eating and drinking in the open markets-- just may have played a role. Perhaps. My doctor, however, says it was more likely due to the much grosser possibility that it's um... in the air. He explained that rural Yucatan still exhibits high rates of open-air defecation, and May is the driest, windiest month, and so... you get the picture.

I guess what impresses me most about those parasites was how they brought me down slowly before moving in for the Big Party Downstairs. I haven't experienced that kind of lethargy since my first year of highschool, when I got mono. I should have noticed the symptoms, but somehow it seemed entirely reasonable to head home at 2 p.m. and sleep for the rest of the day. I thought only vaguely about how lazy I was becoming, and I felt a little bad about that, but only a little. This lasted for about a week.

Then I woke up one day and... party time! Thank god for Dr. Sanchez, who lives right around the corner and works out of his house. No annoying paperwork, no insurance questions, no delay. Dr. Sanchez sat me right down and asked me a series of very detailed questions (in Spanish, thank goodness... I don't even want to imagine that conversation in English!). Before long, I was walking out the door with a couple of prescriptions, and by the next morning, I was a new woman ready to conquer the world.

So that's about it for this posting. I've got tons more to share, but then finding material has never been a problem... computer problems, work, and an emerging social life have conspired to make me less of a blogger lately, but I aim to be more attentive. Thanks for checking in. Come again.