Nothing to Declare

For an unemployed person, I am keeping a pretty busy schedule. Spending a lot of time writing. Continuing to study Spanish - I'm taking lessons from a tutor four hours a week, and I always have homework. I read Universal or La Jornada, two Mexican newspapers, every day, and spend about a half hour reading out loud to work on my terrible pronunciation. I'm at the point where I understand pretty much all of the grammar, but I still can't get the words in my head to come out of my mouth automatically and correctly.

I am trying to get to know more folks around town. Have had dinner or lunch or drinks with several writers, interesting people.

Have had great conversations with an author/poet/60s radical now living on social security and trying to make sense of what happened. Connected with a friend and former newspaper/magazine journalist. He reminds me of Eeyore, but I like him a lot. Through my Spanish tutor, I met a young writer who is living at his folks vacation home here while he tries to come up with book ideas and freelance. He travels to Mexico City a lot, and has found a Friday happy hour for journalists. I may go check that out soon.

Met a group of women who believe in the vibrations of attraction - to oversimplify, they believe the vibes you send out are the ones you get back. So they focus entirely on the positive. Not sure I buy this entirely - they don't "name" illnesses, and the natural extension of this line of thinking would be that holocaust victims attracted their own suffering. But it's an interesting exercise for a cynic like myself to cast every thought in a positive, affirming way, to focus only on the moment and what I intend for the future.

And (talking about burying the lead) this week I even took a crack at bellydancing. Last weekend, I went out with G and some of her girlfriends - the owner of a local store, a painter/artist, a co-owner of a language school. We had a great time dancing at Limerick, a local hangout for mostly younger, mostly Mexican crowd. (Apparently, we caused a stir, because one of the bartenders told the boyfriend of one of the women that the viejas (old ladies) were the center of attention at the club. It's a super small town in a way - everyone knows everyone and you can't do anything without someone finding out about it.)

Anyway, turns out the painter/artist has also been a bellydancer for years. She's beautiful, moves so gracefully. She offered to give us some informal lessons, so Tuesday, we all wrapped shawls around our hips, hiked up our shirts, and danced around an empty room in S's house. It was so much fun. Though the white girls have quite a way to go before we can take our act out, me most of all. My hips can go left or right, and that's about it. S. was trying to get us isolate our various body parts - to do figure 8s with our hips, up and down, back and forth, and shimmies, and snake arms, and rotate our chests without moving our shoulders or hips - and then do it all at the same time while walking.

Ha! As if. We watched some videos and got a sense of the differences between dancers from Egypt and Turkey. Something to shoot for, I suppose. Right now, I look less like I'm entertaining the sultan, more like I'm training the camels. But like everything else.....poco a poco.

Best part: I burned one of S's CDs: Bellylicious. As my friend Joe G. would say: Yeeeeeeessss.