19 Days Later

It has been nineteen days since my last blog post. I have nothing to write about except the night culture. It is consuming me. It is Sunday, and I feel injured from the weekend, an accumulation of tiny, insignificant pains acquired over the past three days. My throat is sore, my voice raspy, from breathing inhaling the second and first hand smoke. My heels and pinky toes are blistered from wet leather on bare skin. My legs are scattered with miscellaneous, penny-sized bruises. My head is heavy. My eyes sting from sleeplessness. A solitary cigarette burn, pink and bubbled, on my forearm. And I'm 300 pesos poorer.

I am having fun here in the way I recognize it as dangerous, self-destructive. The alien jolt of environment change has taken me to the kind of careless place I haven't experience since high school. The second week of class, I haven't read a thing, and I'm not worried. It would be easier to do homework at Disneyworld. At the same time I question how much of the city I am seeing. There is only one side of a city at three in the morning and it's seen through drunk eyes. There is only one side of the city at dawn. At the same time this is the culture, I just haven't learned the game yet

I have been thinking about how it's also a city of hustlers, how everyone seems to have some less legitimate form of making money. My host mother, for example, does not seem to have a job; she has three exchange students staying with her at a time and serves hot dog in some form four times a week. When I first moved in she tried to make me share my room with another girl, but I put up a fight. In some ways it makes the city less accessible; two people in the program were mugged last weekend and I won't be surprised to hear about two more this weekend. But attempting to crack it or navigate feels like even more of an accomplishment.

Somehow the days slipped away; an email from Steve brought me back to reality. I can’t exactly say why writing in this blog has been so hard for me to do. I feel like I have to censor myself, somehow be dishonest about what this experience has been like so far. I am censoring myself. I haven’t been making the best choices. I am questioning how I’ve been spending my time so far. And since I’ve made it to 400 words I’ll leave it at that.