February was mostly composed of trips to new lands, such as Chiapas, Valle de Bravo, Oaxaca, and Michoacan. These are already starting to congeal into one big, blurry super-trip memory in my head, thanks to my awesomely disciplined blogging on the road (note lack of link to further reading). But let it be recorded now that you had much fun, Ms. TwoShoes, even though two of those trips were failed butterfly expeditions.
Late February and March consisted of return visits and retraced steps. Our Fulbright midyear meetup brought me back to the same hotel where we'd landed, clueless, in August, only this time I felt much more at home with my hoop earrings and knock-off designer purse. I had so much fun catching up with the far-flung f.b. gang that I wound up delaying my move to Xalapa another day, so that I could tour the south side canals of Xochimilco with them for a second (totally sweet) time.
My move to the quaint, Alpiney-fresh mountain community of Xalapa took place the next day on a bus, and given my love for The Sound of Music the romance of this was almost unbearable. Fortunately I was bogged down with 6 months' worth of steadily accumulated Mexican crap, such as my collection of knock-off designer purses, making the Fraulein Maria dance to my new apartment pretty much impossible.
I spent 72 lovely hours in my new home, which you can tour thanks to a video by its rad former inhabitants. I spent most of that time inside, working, lounging, and sewing buttons on several sweaters which, again, was suddenly the neatest thing ever in my country surroundings. I did manage to get out to the supermarket, where I realized that setting up a Mexican kitchen from scratch is a tricky but totally exhilarating task. Vanilla extract, for example, comes in only one size: half-liter. Since I didn't have a shopping list, I just conjured up one of those Flemish still lifes in my head and worked from that instead.
But before I knew it, my country life was interrupted and I lugged a suitcase back onto a bus bound for Mexico City, in order to fly back to Chicago for the weekend. Over the course of three days, the weather morphed before me like the colors of a mood ring. What started out green and peaceful suddenly flared up red and hot in the hazy Wednesday evening sunset at the Mexico City TAPO terminal. This was followed by the blue, cold drizzle of Chicago, where I stayed for three days, got interviewed by a parade of professors for a grad program, and turned twenty-four.
In one of my interviews, I snuck a sleep-deprived yawn while my interviewer looked through my file. Noticing that I keep a blog, he commented that blogs often make him feel guilty when he slacks off on their upkeep. I told him I could not understand this better, since I had spent weeks away from my own blogs. But, I had to ask, since I was practically in slumber-party gossip mode, hadn't he ever experienced the feeling of bloggles?
What is bloggles, he asked, inviting me to proceed to ruin whatever academic potential he'd seen in my file.
Holding back another yawn, I suddenly found myself speaking openly for the first time all day. It's the way you start to see the world when you're consistently and actively blogging, I said. It makes you look for themes, and try to frame moments with good composition, like if you were taking a picture. It's good for your imagination, and helps you (er, should help you) to be concise.
