archived recent articles

5 files changed, 293 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/published/2018-09-25_southbound.txt b/published/2018-09-25_southbound.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8e6551a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2018-09-25_southbound.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+From our perch on the Colorado high plateau we descended southward, to the small little town of Limon where we waited out a two day heat wave in a motel, with a swimming pool. Once it cooled down we broke from our usual back roads ways, jumped on the interstate and spent the next two weeks slowly working our way across Kansas, which we really liked, then down through Oklahoma, which we were less fond of, and finally to Dallas to visit family. 
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-04_115807_kansas.jpg" id="image-1681" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-01_132219_kansas.jpg" id="image-1680" class="picwide caption" />
+
+It was about 900 miles in all, which we spread out over two weeks. The first two weeks of September were a wet two weeks in this part of the country. I think we saw the sun maybe two days in that time, and even then, not for long. It was probably the least interesting two weeks of our trip thus far. At least for me. I was either working or driving, which quickly makes Jack a dull boy as it were. I didn't realize just how busy I had been until I went back and looked for pictures to post and realized I only had a few.
+
+It probably wasn't a whole lot more exciting for Corrinne and the kids, though they did sneak off into Wichita to a children's museum once, and the kids made some friends in our favorite weekend stopover, the small town of Ellis Kansas, where we met a lot of really nice people.
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-06_174252_kansas.jpg" id="image-1682" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-06_174401_kansas.jpg" id="image-1683" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-12_170702_oklahoma.jpg" id="image-1684" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-13_152633_oklahoma.jpg" id="image-1685" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-13_152739_oklahoma.jpg" id="image-1686" class="picwide" />
+
+
+You might be wondering, why did they spend two weeks doing almost nothing, driving through the midwest? 
+
+Well, first off, I would say that until we got to Wichita, Kansas is very much the west. It looks like the west, it feels like the west. And then somewhere in there you cross that invisible line, which some say is the 100th meridian, but which I think is far too ephemeral and shifting to pin down that precisely, and the humidity is back, the undergrowth lusher, and you're in the east again.
+
+But, the real answer to that question requires going back to the very beginning, before we ever had the bus.
+
+One day Corrinne came into my office at our house in Athens and said she thought we should move abroad, to Nicaragua, which we both enjoyed when we spent a couple months there. A friend of ours had moved down there recently and really liked it. At the time the girls were still babies and Elliott hadn't been born yet. I said sure, let's move to Nicaragua. I mean why not?
+
+But I've always thought the United States, despite its many flaws, is a very beautiful place and I wanted the kids to see it before we left. So I said, okay, let's move abroad, but first let's get an old camper and drive around the U.S for a while so the kids can see it. My wife, as I recall, said, I don't know about that. But I started to do some research on old trailers.
+
+In the process I discovered the bus. Not our bus, not right away anyway, but the Travco more generally, and, well, you know how that ends. But this was just before Elliott was born, Corrinne wasn't sold on the bus idea yet. It wasn't until about four months later, we were down in Apalachicola, and one day Corrinne came up from the beach and said, okay, I could travel for a while. About a month later we found the bus for sale and bought it.
+
+The rest of the story is documented here already. The point is though that, for us,  traveling around the U.S. was always a temporary precursor to going abroad. 
+
+So, after over a year and half of living in the bus we decided the time had come to head abroad for a while. In those 19 months though many things have changed. We're not going to Nicaragua, which has become decidedly unstable in recent months, but we are storing the bus for a few months and heading down the Mexico. Corrinne's parents retired to San Miguel de Allende earlier this year and we thought we'd visit and let the presence of loved ones ease the transition a little for the kids. We are, in other words, sticking to what has always been our rough plan[^1].
+
+We could have driven the bus down to Mexico, and someday we might. In fact I'd really like to do the west coast of Mexico in the bus as some point. But since our plan is to stay in one place for a while, bringing the bus didn't make sense. My brother-in-law's parents have some land outside Dallas that they said we could store the bus on, so we decided to leave it for a while (many thanks to Terry and Gram for taking care of our baby while we're gone). No, we're not done with it yet. I don't think. Certainly no one wanted to leave it, but different places demand different travel strategies, and the bus was not the best strategy for what we want to do for the next six months. We'll miss the bus, it still feels like our home, but now it's time for something different. 
+
+Before we caught a flight south though we got to spend a week with family around Dallas, swimming, running some last minutes errands and somehow managing to squeak in some fishing and swimming time out at the lake.
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-20_081419_dallas.jpg" id="image-1688" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-21_110232_dallas.jpg" id="image-1689" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-22_102203_dallas.jpg" id="image-1690" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-22_145326_dallas.jpg" id="image-1691" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-22_145712_dallas.jpg" id="image-1692" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-23_133906_dallas.jpg" id="image-1696" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-22_165300_dallas.jpg" id="image-1693" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-23_140435_dallas.jpg" id="image-1694" class="picwide" />
+
+And then, before we really knew it, we were in the air.
+
+
+[^1]: The idea that we have a plan is completely laughable. What we have is more like a collection of ideas that float around our heads like balloons and every now and then we grab one and float away on it for a while. These ideas are often contradictory and impossible. I think it was Eisenhower who said plans are useless, but planning is essential.
diff --git a/published/2018-09-29_big-exit.txt b/published/2018-09-29_big-exit.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3dfb1b5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2018-09-29_big-exit.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+The blue-gray light of the distant dawn filters down the canyons of building to the city streets outside the window. I've been awake for hours already, listening to the city. The grinding staccato of diesel engines, the pop and sharp hiss of hydraulic arms raised and lowered, the clatter of metal doors rolling up, the clanging rattle of chains banging against them, shops entered, and the rattle and clang again as the doors close behind the shop keepers.
+
+Later comes the soft hiss of brooms on the sidewalk, the splash of water thrown out a bucket, and the louder hiss of the broom in the soapy water, the jangle of handcart wheels rolling over uneven stone of sidewalks. Last comes the rush of cars, the muted voices of workers emptying trash, and the blue gray light turning to the white of day.
+
+This is no longer the largest city on earth. Last time I was here it was, but that, as my wife regularly reminds me, was a long time ago. Now Chongqing China is three times as large as this. Still, Mexico City is a hell of a city. Larger than any other on this continent. And there is something about here that is more alive than anywhere else on the continent. It is big, loud, overwhelming, incomprehensible. Wonderful in its way. 
+
+We arrived yesterday afternoon, made it through customs and caught a cab to our rental apartment. The first thing we did was head out for tacos. Just kidding. The first food we went for was Indian. Corrinne and I have a kind of tradition of eating in immigrant restaurants. Our first meal in Nicaragua was at a Palestinian restaurant. Our favorite meal in Paris was at an Iraqi restaurant. For Mexico City we went Indian. Then we walked down to the zócalo and watched the sun fade away and the blue twilight descend.
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-25_192316_la-ciudad-mexico.jpg" id="image-1710" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-25_192520_la-ciudad-mexico.jpg" id="image-1711" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-25_192034_la-ciudad-mexico.jpg" id="image-1709" class="picwide" />
+
+It was a great end cap to a long day of travel, which was surprisingly smooth all things considered. Our kids are pretty great at entertaining themselves anywhere, using almost nothing, so airports and airplanes were, relatively speaking, pretty much non-stop entertainment. Just the notion that *we're floating above the planet* was enough to keep them enthralled for a three hour flight. 
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-27_172551_la-ciudad-mexico.jpg" id="image-1712" class="cluster picwide" />
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2018/20180925_112822.jpg" id="image-1714" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2018/20180925_125244.jpg" id="image-1715" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-25_122019_la-ciudad-mexico.jpg" id="image-1708" class="cluster picwide" />
+</div>
+
+I was a little worried about going through customs, someone saying the wrong thing, being grumpy and throwing a fit, etc, but everyone was fine, we coasted right on through without missing a beat.
+
+I won't lie, I felt my spirits lift considerably after the rather bored customs official stamped the last of our stack of passports and waved us out of no-man's-land and into Mexico. I get a giddy feeling every time I leave the United States, a feeling that I've somehow managed to survive something, though exactly what is unclear to me. 
+
+I don't want to write some cliche bit about how the United States sucks or what have you. I like the United States, it has its upsides -- mostly that nearly everyone we know and love lives there -- but one thing that I think universally irks travelers and expats is the smug satisfaction that folks back home have about how "free" they are. If Americans have a blind spot, it's this. We *believe* we're free. 
+
+We are not free at all relative to the rest of the world. Oh sure, we have the right to assemble, which is often lacking elsewhere, but in terms of daily life, the United States is the most micromanaged, regulated country I've ever been to.
+
+I'll be honest, it feels good to leave that behind for a while. And that's all I'm going to say about that.
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-25_192837-1_la-ciudad-mexico.jpg" id="image-1713" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2018/20180927_090630.jpg" id="image-1716" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-25_105829_la-ciudad-mexico.jpg" id="image-1707" class="cluster picwide" />
+</div>
+
+We explored Mexico City for a few days, adjusted to city life as opposed to roaming the wilds of the United States, and then, we were done. Or rather we weren't done, but we were ready to get to something more permanent. We ended up cutting our time in Mexico City a little short and jumping a bus for San Miguel de Allende. The biggest festival of the year was about to start in San Miguel and we didn't want to miss it.
diff --git a/published/2018-10-06_alborada.txt b/published/2018-10-06_alborada.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..71cddfd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2018-10-06_alborada.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+We left Mexico City earlier than we'd planned in part to make it back to San Miguel in time to catch the weekend-long Alborada festival. We grabbed the fancy fast bus from MXCD to San Miguel, which came complete with seat-back movie screens that the kids used to watch some cartoons in Spanish. I watched the countryside roll by and, by force of habit, kept track of campgrounds via the [ioverlander](http://ioverlander.com/) site.
+
+Since we got to San Miguel four days early, we had nowhere to stay. Fortunately Corrinne's parents squeezed us in and we spent the next day wandering around, getting a feel for our new home.
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_115239_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1718" class="cluster picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_132826_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1722" class="cluster picwide" />
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_114011_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1719" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_194548_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1728" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+</div>
+
+A day later the Alborada began. At 4 AM in the morning. Actually it was closer to 2 AM. The Jardin was packed, there was plenty of music and then thousands and thousands of fireworks. Not that I saw it, but I did periodically wake up to volley's of fireworks between 3 and 5 AM. 
+
+I've been in quite a few large scale parties -- Songkran, Chinese New Year, New Year's Eve in New York. San Miguel's Alborada deserves a spot among those, it's a hell of a party and it lasts for four or five days.
+
+There's way too much to keep track of as an outsider, but we managed to see a couple parades, hours and hours of dancing, drumming and music, a blessing of the horses, which saw at least a thousand horses and riders come into town one afternoon (technically I don't think the horses are part of Alborada, but it happened the same weekend this year), giant paper maché dolls dancing, and the "Voladores de Papantla" which are people spinning on ropes around a 100 foot high pole, slowly lowering to the ground.
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_112530_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1717" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_124201_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1720" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_125834_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1721" class="picwide" />
+
+From what I've read, the central premise of the festival/party is, well, it depends a little on who you are, how Catholic you are and how far back into history you want to reach. Ostensibly though the parade at least is the story of St Michael, patron saint of San Miguel, defeating um, something. How exactly the very indigenous parts of the festival -- the Chichimecas are the local tribe in this area --  fit with that is a little mysterious to me. 
+
+The dancing groups are highly organized in a hierarchy of seniority, with each group of dancers having two elders who represent the Aztec gods Cipactonal and Oxomoco, who handed down the various rites to humanity. And at least some of the dances represent the various tribes asking for forgiveness for "misunderstandings and mistreatments" from the other tribes.
+
+That much a bit of research can teach you, but how that all fits together with the post-conquest Catholic symbolism and the festival of St Miguel is something you'd have to be born into to really understand in any meaningful way. 
+
+As an outsider all you can really do is watch. So we did. And there were conchero dancers, huge xúchiles (floral arrangements with palm fronds and lots of marigolds mounted on bamboo frames), and more traditional parade-style floats, all going up our street to the church and square at the top of the hill, the parroquia.
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_171455_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1723" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_171517-1_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1724" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_172613_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1725" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_172930-2_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1726" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-29_173522_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1727" class="picwide" />
+
+The dancing lasts late into the night. We, for most part, did not last very late into the night. One night after the kids were asleep Corrinne and I walked up to the parroquia and watched the Voladores. 
+
+
+The next day everyone was back up in the parroquia area and the dancing picked up roughly where it left off the night before.
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-30_153242_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1729" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-30_161048-3_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1733" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-30_161100_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1734" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-30_160638_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1731" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-30_161041-2_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1732" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-30_160614-1_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1730" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-30_161126-1_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1735" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-30_161212-1_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1736" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-30_161314_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1737" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-09-30_164020-1_alborada-festival.jpg" id="image-1738" class="picwide" />
diff --git a/published/2018-10-23_como-se-goza-en-el-barrio.txt b/published/2018-10-23_como-se-goza-en-el-barrio.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bb564d5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2018-10-23_como-se-goza-en-el-barrio.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,77 @@
+Every morning I get up, put on my coffee, and walk all the way to the front of the house to swing open the two oaken doors that serve as our window onto the street below. I can tell the time by what's happening outside. Usually the eastern sky is already glowing pink behind the hill, but the streetlights are still on and the western sky a deep purplish blue with three stars still visible. The rock pigeons and white-winged doves will be just arriving, pausing here and there on rooftops as they make their way uphill. Most mornings a quiet pair of little Inca doves sit on drain pipes two stories up, eye level with me, watching the street below. Sometimes we watch each other, the doves and I.
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-10-14_072906_around-san-miguel.jpg" id="image-1739" class="picwide" />
+
+Even in the half light the street is always filled with people. If it's very early I'll see the sweepers making their way up, cleaning the night's debris. After them come the workers, walking up the hill to their jobs, munching tamales or breads, rolls, containers of fruit, some with cups of coffee or bottles of coke. There's a rhythm to their movement, like rivulets of water bouncing over stone sidewalks. It's a rhythm that's matched by another coming down the hill -- buses wheeze and groan making the turn onto San Antonio just before our house, and cars and motorcycles weave in and out and around, dropping off spouses to work, children to school. Snatches of conversation drift up to the window where I sit, goodbyes and hellos floating around the ever-brightening day. 
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-10-26_071223_around-san-miguel.jpg" id="image-1743" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-10-26_074222_around-san-miguel.jpg" id="image-1740" class="picwide" />
+
+Sometimes, if I'm late to the window the vendors are already pulling in their carts, setting up for the day --  the fruit sellers, the juice lady, and somewhere down the street, the tamale lady. 
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-10-26_074428_around-san-miguel.jpg" id="image-1741" class="picwide" />
+
+Nearly always there is music. It is loudest between 12AM and 2AM when people seem to leave the bars and head back out to wherever they live, speakers throbbing. But people walk with music playing on phones in the morning too. No one plays music quietly. It's my kind of place in that sense because even if I don't like the music, which I usually do, but even if I don't, I still like it loud. Occasionally someone walks up the street playing guitar and singing. Once Elliott and I sat in a chair at the window and watched a lone drummer come up in the middle of the day, pounding out a beat for no apparent reason other than he wanted to play the drum. This morning a small parade of indecipherable origin or destination wandered by with horns, drums and guitars.
+
+<div class="picwide">
+	<video poster="/media/images/videos/2018/poster051.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="4" class="vidautovid">
+		<source src="/media/images/videos/2018/0051-web2.webm" type="video/webm">
+		<source src="/media/images/videos/2018/051-web_vJQHktQ.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
+	</video>
+</div>
+
+For all its constancy though, we get little continuity. Music drifts up from the street and into our house in little staccato bursts, the time it takes for a car or bus or motorcycle to pass by with its ranchero, samba, salsa or more modern, less drifting, more wall shaking sounds of pop, rock and rap, and then it's gone, on down the hill.
+
+At first the constant noise was annoying, but we adjusted. Now it feels slightly strange on the rare occasions when I hear no squeal of worn brakes, rattle and growl of engines in various states of collapse, or shouts or cries or clangs or dings or clamor, when I hear silence. 
+
+It might sound strange, given how much time we've spent away from the clamor of cities, to know that I like it. It surprises me a bit, but there are some qualifications worth mentioning. For instance, this is a real city, not a sanitized one. The streets here are where people live out their lives to a large degree. People rule the streets, not cars. Food is everywhere. There are no huge stores, there are tiny stores selling single things well. To get everything you need you'll need to visit a dozen of them, talk to dozen people, interact with a dozen more coming and going. Life is more public, but more fun too. There's only one place in America I can think of that even comes close -- New Orleans, but even it lacks the street food.
+
+We do miss being outside all the time, and it might bother me more if I didn't know that I'll be returning to outside life again.
+
+And it did take a little adjusting to being in a city. 
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<img src="images/2018/2018-10-26_173753_around-san-miguel.jpg" id="image-1744" class="cluster picwide" />
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2018/2018-10-26_173607_around-san-miguel_zIuxRi0.jpg" id="image-1746" class="cluster pic66 caption" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-10-26_173953_around-san-miguel.jpg" id="image-1747" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+</div>
+
+There is always that period of shock when you first arrive somewhere new, especially if its outside your birth culture. I think what people mean when they say "culture shock" is the severe cognitive dissidence that comes from realizing that everything you think is true, and "just the way things are" turns out to be neither. 
+
+Everything you believe, do, say, and think is relative to the culture you were raised in. 
+
+We say that a lot -- everything is relative -- and we think we know what it means, but by and large we don't *live* it. Go abroad and you will suddenly live it.
+
+The simplest things in life become grand adventures. You either thrive on this or you have a rough time until you figure out the new world you're in. Or you go home. Even if you enjoy it like I do, it can still be overwhelming at times.
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<img src="images/2018/DSC08128.jpg" id="image-1760" class="cluster picwide" />
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2018/DSC08134.jpg" id="image-1761" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-10-26_191411_around-san-miguel.jpg" id="image-1748" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+</div>
+
+
+This is why, generally speaking, people spend their vacation in little islands of their own culture that have established themselves abroad. People from the United States go to Cancun because there's an entire industry set up to insulate them from having to deal with the vast difference between their culture and the local culture. Australians go to Bali for the same reason. The British love India. The Japanese have enclaves that put a little bit of Tokyo in Bangkok. You can rest assured that every place you think of as a tourist destination, every place that's on the cover of a glossy travel magazine, is a place your culture has established a kind of bulkhead. 
+
+A lot of people on the internet turn up their noses at these sort of places, "tourist traps" is the snob's term for them. Some people seem to think they lack authenticity, as if some things in the world were somehow more real than others. That doesn't mean you should spend your time (or any money) in tourist traps. I don't. But they have their place and they have value. 
+
+Tourist traps -- bulkheads if you will -- are important gateways between worlds. If there wasn't some way to smooth over cultural differences nearly everyone who ever left their own culture would be back the next day. I know this because I made the rookie mistake of avoiding tourist traps on my first trip abroad, and my first week in India was pretty rough.
+
+It's really hard to relearn every assumption you've ever made about the world. No one wants to spend their precious two to six weeks of vacation a year doing that. It's not most people's idea of fun. Good tourist bulkheads smooth some of this over, allow in just enough outside culture to whet your appetite for more, but not so much that you spend an entire day struggling to find toothpaste.
+
+I happen to be one of those weird people that thrives on turning my world upside down. I like spending the day trying to figure out how the hell to buy toothpaste. Then the next day, you don't have to worry about toothpaste, you can move on to the next thing. Little by little you find the things you want and you form these little patterns, you walk over here to get tortillas, over here to get coffee, over there to get roast pollo, up the hill for the gordita lady, around the corner to the flouta lady, to the market downhill for veggies, but the market uphill for fruit and meat. You figure things out, day by day, little by little. Until, if you're me, you start to notice your little patterns.
+
+Sometimes I see myself like I imagine a hawk sees the patterns of a field mouse moving to and fro, getting seeds here, roots other there, all by traveling well-worn trenches in the grass that are obvious to good eyes even 2000 feet in the air. If you're me you notice these trails and you force yourself out of them, force yourself to find a new fruit vendor, a new butcher, a new gordita stand, a new place with better salsa, a new queso stand in the mercado, a new pollo rostizado seller. Actually, no, I'm loyal to the chicken lady. We have an understanding. You have to have some patterns.
+
+Eventually though you parse out a place and start to find yourself in it, start to understand it in some way. Not the way the people born into it do, but in your way. 
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-10-26_173435_around-san-miguel.jpg" id="image-1742" class="picwide caption" />
+
+That's a common expat mistake, thinking you understand a place like the locals. That's impossible. I will never understand San Miguel the way the locals do. And they'll never understand the Los Angeles area the way I do. But you do start to develop your own understanding. Finding your places helps you find your place. And surprisingly quickly a place can come to feel like home, whether it's the wilds of Lake Superior, the barren emptiness of the Badlands, or the main drag in San Miguel de Allende. Home is where you are.
+
+<small>[Note: Most of the titles on luxagraf come from songs, I rarely point it out, but in this case, since it's in Spanish, I thought I'd mention the translation: *Como Se Goza En El barrio* translates literally to "how you enjoy in the neighborhood". The song is by the great Cuban musician [Arsenio Rodríguez](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenio_Rodríguez) and comes from the album of the same name, which is well worth getting if you enjoy Cuban son, mambo and similar styles of music.]</small>
diff --git a/published/2018-11-03_friday.txt b/published/2018-11-03_friday.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0265767
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2018-11-03_friday.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,73 @@
+It was a week of Fridays. Some weeks are like that, you're forever on the edge of a weekend, but never quite there.
+
+The first Friday that week was a Tuesday. I got fired from the programming job I've had for a couple years now. I wasn't particularly surprised, companies are made of people, when the people change, the companies change. These things happen. But hey, if [you ain't got no job...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4tbZ7xnEjk) it's Friday. I walked down to the tienda and grabbed a Modelo. As you do. Maybe it was two. It could have been three. But no more. Their fridge is much colder than ours and they're only thirty feet from the front door. Never buy more than you need.
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<img src="images/2018/IMG_20181002_074946260.jpg" id="image-1770" class="cluster picwide caption" />
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2018/20181010_181546.jpg" id="image-1768" class="cluster pic66 caption" />
+<img src="images/2018/IMG_20181112_162020720.jpg" id="image-1769" class="cluster pic66 caption" />
+</span>
+</div>
+
+The next Friday was Wednesday, Halloween. 
+
+It's not much of a holiday down here and honestly, aside from some candy corn I brought down for Elliott, who has been obsessed with the stuff ever since he discovered it last year at Ron's house, we were pretty much going to skip Halloween this year. 
+
+That said, the girls' dance teacher wanted to take all the kids down the Parrochia/Jardin area after class on Halloween, where, apparently, the expats hand out candy. I thought, well isn't that creepy of them. But then I'm always slagging the expats and I've been trying to do that less so I didn't say anything. It turned out to be way creepier than even I had imagined, but the kids got to walk around town in their costumes and really didn't care about anything else. They had a ball.
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-10-31_175853_halloween.jpg" id="image-1762" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-10-31_183730_halloween.jpg" id="image-1763" class="picwide" />
+
+I can't remember if I've allowed myself to print this yet or not, but generally speaking my least favorite people on earth are American expats of a certain kind. Typically of the baby boomer generation, always of the upper middle class, usually from one of the coastal states. 
+
+I don't mean tourists or travelers. A friend asked me if it's touristy here. It is, I think. I mean we're tourists, we're here. But I grew up surrounded by tourists. But we tourists are, at worst, a harmless cold -- even if it's horrible for a day we'll be gone soon enough. And before I say what I'm about to say let me first say we've met some really wonderful people here, some who've been here a long time, but I think of them as long term tourists. They are not of species of expat that was in the Jardin on Halloween. 
+
+No, the expats I am referring to are a different breed. They're cancer to the tourist cold. A malignant and unstoppable destructive force. And they're like obscenity, no one can quite define them, but you know them when you see them. 
+
+In Asia these expats are almost universally men, and they have almost universally left home to buy the sort of women they could never get to acknowledge them in the States. That's just one subspecies though. There are others. Here I've overheard more than a few expat women saying the same things I heard come out of the mouths of American men in Thailand. The kinds of things miserable, lonely people say about the happy people who surround them. 
+
+Why come to a place full of people you sneeringly look down on? I think that's actually why they come -- geo-arbitrage. The value of the dollar allows them to live like the elites that sneered down at them back home. They run away from that and yet quickly turn into the same petty tyrants that ruled over them back home. It's sad really. Fortunately here it's pretty easy to avoid them. Stay out of the expensive restaurants and you'll almost never run into these types of people (in Asia sometimes it's a bit tougher to avoid them).
+
+Alas, Halloween in San Miguel apparently brings them all out of the woodwork. 
+
+After the girls' dance class was over all the kids changed into their Halloween costumes and Michelle, their teacher, the six or so other kids, their families, and the five of us all walked the half mile or so down to the Jardin. There, in exchange for candy, a bunch of older expats took pictures of all the kids. Not weird at all.
+
+<img src="images/2018/IMG_20181031_180431569.jpg" id="image-1771" class="picwide caption" />
+
+Usually when you see people of your own nation behaving badly you really have no idea how the locals feel. Do they care? Do they just think crazy American (or Brit, or German, or whatever)? This was interesting because everyone assumed, since I was walking with a group of Mexican families, that I was Mexican as well. I don't propose to speak for anyone, but I think I might understand an inkling of how they felt, and here's the thing obnoxious expat baby boomers of San Miguel: I'm pretty sure no one likes you. 
+
+I can be a little confrontational with people behaving badly in public. If someone is out of hand my instinct is to stop them. Especially when kids are involved. If you want to provoke me to violence, messing with my kids is the fastest way to do it. If all this had happened in the U.S., I'll be honest, I'd probably be in jail. Here I am a guest and I try to be a good guest. So I watched the families I was with and did what they did. I forced myself to to be overly polite, to smile and encourage my kids to smile. Perhaps it was ordinary to them, I don't really know. It was odd enough to me that I had one of those experiences where I get to watch myself from outside myself. 
+
+I walked away thinking that when you're on the outside looking in, you never really know how tightly someone's lips are pressed when they smiling back at you.
+
+The way people were looking at me for a mere half an hour, the belittling smiles, the unconscious patronizing, the palpable feeling that someone else thinks you are less human than them, is how some people are treated day in and day out, every single day all over the world Because of the combined random chance of skin color, geopolitical boundaries, and the amount of money, power and opportunities those things granted me, I very rarely get treated this way. It's a luxury I take for granted. On Halloween for a moment I didn't have that luxury. But it was only for a moment -- when the candy buckets were full the kids and I could walk away, me shaking my head at the whole thing. Not everyone gets to do that. 
+
+I've been a bit more reserved when I'm out and about ever since. I've also been more sensitive to people behaving badly around me, which is one of the reasons there's so few pictures in this post.
+
+The next Friday was Thursday, Dia de Muertes day one.
+
+Day of the dead is a colorful holiday, lots of marigolds, candles and, at night, fireworks. We went out wandering the town in the morning, watching people set up all the elaborate decorations. Unfortunately we kept running across people behaving badly, particularly people with cameras. We watched people shove cameras in Abuelas' faces while they tried to make shrines for their dead, the parents they missed, the children they'd lost. And let's be clear, it wasn't "people" it was, in all three cases I witnessed, white males. In the midst of a celebration designed to honor the dead you're going to shove your camera in an old Mexican woman's face? That's rude any day of the week. And to what end? So you can post some shit to the internet to impress your friends with... what exactly? How little you understand the culture that's been kind enough to allow you to visit it? I don't understand what how anyone comes to think it's okay to behave this way.
+
+And of course it's the shitty photographers doing this stuff, the people who take pictures no one wants to see anyway because they have no empathy, no real feeling, no soul, lack even the self-awareness to recognize that there is a soul. Shitty selfies in which the self just happens to be outside the frame.
+
+Real photographers, the people making art out of the beauty they see around them,  don't take pictures like that, they never take pictures without permission, never take pictures without knowing a person, even if only for a few moments. I watched shit photographer after shit photographer all weekend and I didn't want to be like them. I'm too shy to go out and meet people and ask to take their photographs, so I took the other sensible path, I put my camera away. The only pictures I have of Dia de Muertes are of me, my family, and few of the public decorations we saw while walking around. 
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<img src="images/2018/2018-11-01_121201_halloween.jpg" id="image-1765" class="cluster picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-11-01_120716_halloween.jpg" id="image-1764" class="cluster picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-11-01_181758-1_halloween.jpg" id="image-1766" class="cluster picwide" />
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2018/IMG_20181101_175814520.jpg" id="image-1772" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+</div>
+
+And that's how it's supposed to be I think. I always sort of thought of Dia de Muertes as a Mexican Halloween, but it's not at all. It's a celebration of *your* dead. Like everything in this country it's about your family, your history, your people. There's an essay I really like, <cite>[Let Me Die like a Mexican](https://claritamannion.wordpress.com/2016/10/25/dia-de-muertos/)</cite>, which calls Dia de Muertes a "bittersweet reflection on love, loss and life well lived." That's very much what it felt like to me.
+
+It's also the day the dead come back to visit the loved ones they've left behind. That's not metaphorical and it's not taken lightly. Everything that's done is done to make their journey back from the underworld more pleasant -- the food, the offerings, the alcohol, it's all for the returning family members. Any student of the world's bardo literature knows that coming out of the underworld is no easy task. You're going to want a drink afterward. 
+
+Walking around during the day I spent a fair bit of time contemplating how Dia de Muertes managed to survive the Catholic church. It's the most overtly pagan celebration I've ever seen. Sometimes the older pagan ways are too strong to be denied I guess. What comes from below almost always outlasts what is imposed from above. Surprisingly, the recent movie, Coco, does a pretty decent job of capturing what the celebrations here are actually like.
+
+I, on the other hand, cannot do a decent job of explaining what Dia de Muertes was like because I decided I wasn't invited. My dead are nowhere near here and I've got nothing for them even if they came. I'd never really thought about it until that night, but I'm a crap descendant in that regard. I've never done anything to honor the dead in my family, certainly nothing of the sort that happens on Dia De Muertes here. I don't even think about them much if I'm honest. I didn't even make to their funerals in most cases, what business do I have being out on day of the dead?
+
+So I went back to the apartment. I sat  in the little covered outdoor area between the two rooms,  listening to the fireworks, watching the flickering colors in the window. I drank a Modelo. Maybe two. It could have been three. I mumbled something about it being Friday, and it was actually Friday by then, and I ain't got no job, I ain't got shit to do.