I’ve been sick for a week now and I’m pretty worn out. Everytime I think I’m feeling better I go for a walk or try and do something and end up in a feverish heap. So, to cheer myself up this is what I’m listening to…makes me smile everytime:
Update: Well, that’s cheered me up! My sister has just given birth to a baby boy this morning in Holles Street hospital. Congratulations Deborah and Eric!
Psssst…I should get this in before you read any further in case it sours me in your opinion, but the voting for the Irish Blog Awards ends this evening at 5pm, so if you were planning on putting a vote in you’d better get going! Oh, and there’s five copies of Windows Vista Home Premium to be won too so how’s that for incentive?
Happy Friday everyone. I know I’m a true 9-5er once more now that I measure my time in terms of how many days until the weekend.
An ugly thing happened the other day that let me know I’ve been infected with an unpleasant disease: As is my usual routine, I made my way to the DART station at the end of the day, struggling through the crowds of people to make it to the platform before my train arrived. I could feel my frustration mounting all the way along the quays as everyone seemed to be intent on stepping in front of me, or muscling against me. The mood was ugly and there were plenty of fierce looks and clucking tongues every direction I turned so by the time I made it to the final battle spot, the pedestrian crossing at Tara Street, I was feeling a tightness in my chest.
This crossing point always reminds me of a movie battle scene when the two opposing armies rush headlong into eachother with a crash and start lopping limbs and heads from bodies. The lights are fitted with a digital countdown which counts the time until the green man appears and everyone waits and watches on the balls of their feet, jostling slightly for a place in the front row before the neon digits reach zero and the two sides mash together, fighting to reach the opposite side.
I made the station with just seconds to spare and the DART trundled in as I was walking along the platform. Anyone who takes the DART on a regular basis soon learns the exact spots along the platform where the doors of the train will line up and there is some competition for these places. As the train rumbled slowly to a stop I was thinking of nothing other than that I wanted a seat. I had an hour’s journey ahead of me but I wasn’t desperate to sit down because of that, I was caught up purely in the competition. All around me people were tense and on edge waiting for those doors to open. Shoulders were set and feet were planted and nobody was about to let anyone else get past them, let alone the poor unfortunates who needed to get off the train. The doors slid back and for a few awkward moments there was a stalemate as those that were leaving the train and those that were determined to get on the train tried to occupy the same space. I am ashamed to say I was among them. I jostled and shoved and glared with the best of them, refusing to step backwards until I was onboard. Once on, I rushed for a seat managing to plonk my bum on one of the very last empty places right under the nose of another girl who scowled at me and sloped off to stand with the other losers.
As I sat there catching my breath I suddenly came back to myself. I didn’t feel triumphant at all, instead I felt a little bit sick. I’d been so sure of my absolute right to a seat that I’d become exactly the type of person I hated. I was a DART commuter!
The person who sits in their seat reading their paper and ignores the pregnant woman standing beside them.
The person who pretends to be sleeping so they don’t have to relinquish their spot to the old man.
The person who plonks their bag on the seat beside them so they can have both seats to themselves.
It wasn’t a pleasant realisation. I find myself having to be constantly vigilant or the red mist will descend again and, before I know it, I’ll be kicking the white stick away from a blind person in an attempt to stop him getting on the train before me!
So, is there a cure? A meeting I can go to? DART Commuter’s Anonymous?
In 1993, not long after I’d finished animation college and still a few months from turning 21, I moved to Lubbock, a small town in West Texas to study in a programme called Adventures In Missions (AIM). For nine months, with a class of 80 people, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, I studied subjects like the Old and New Testament, Apologetics, team dynamics and teaching methods all in preparation for the practical side of the programme which would mean working as an apprentice missionary in a foreign city. After the nine months were over our class had been divided up into teams to be sent to countries all over the world and my team of six…four girls and two boys…had chosen Mexico city as our home for the next nineteen months.
That year and a half was the most amazing time of my life. We lived in two apartments (one for the girls and one for the boys) in the south of the city close to the university where the 1968 Olympics took place. El D.F. (pronounced “El Day Eff-Aay”), as it’s known to the locals, is one of the largest cities in the world. At the time it had something like 29 million living there although how they could possibly come to any reliable figure I don’t know. I’ll never forget the first time I flew over the mountains and saw the city stretching from horizon to horizon.
As I sit here and try to encapsulate it all I find it almost impossible. So many experiences and emotions were crammed into that short time that I’m afraid I’ll misrepresent it in some way. Part of my hesitation is the job we were doing there as I know that many people would raise their eyebrows at the thought of mission work. Usually, here in Ireland anyway, when I’ve told people I spent some time as a missionary they think one of two things: either they picture a nun or medical missionary working in the jungle, or they think of the Jehovah’s Witnesses that call at the door. Neither one describes my time down there.
We didn’t really have a typical day, it changed depending on what stage we were at in our Spanish and what was going on in the church that we were working with. The Metro congregation is a large group of Christians that meet in the centre of the city and a lot of our activities revolved around their young people. One day we might be playing football in the park with the deaf members of the church, another day we might be painting the building. We were there to soak up whatever we could and hopefully help more than we hindered.
But that was just the framework of it all. My memories of that time are a mixed bag of the weird and wonderful experiences:
A daytrip to watch autopsies at the city morgue with a law student friend of mine.
Wednesday night dinners with Mama Carola.
Terrifying bus trips into the mountains that I thought I might not survive.
Watching Ireland get beaten by Mexico in the World Cup and the celebrations on the street afterwards.
The 7 point earthquake that rocked my bed across the room one morning.
Learning how to salsa in the middle of a huge street party.
My short-lived career as a model.
The citywide (and somewhat scary) egg and flour fight that happens on Independence Day…
…and so many more.
Niall asked in the comments to my previous post why I left. Well, I could have extended my time there, and others did. In fact some of them have gone back and are living there now. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if I had stayed but really by the time the nineteen months were up I was ready to go home. I’d formed such strong bonds with my teammates (eventhough we had fights that would put Big Brother contestants to shame on a regular basis) that I didn’t want to stay once they’d gone.
So I went home and started the difficult process of finding my feet again. It took me four years to find a job as an animator and during that time I actually had some worries that I’d made a mistake by flitting off to Mexico instead of getting my career off the ground. I don’t have those feelings anymore; in fact I miss it every day.
Me: We’re going to need a babysitter for Thursday night
Matt: How come?
Me: We’re going to a wine reception…
Matt: Why? (mmmm….wiiinne)
Me: …and then to a special preview screening of a new film…
Matt: Ooookaaay (have I forgotten an anniversary or a birthday?)
Me: …followed by a Q & A with the stars of the film.
Matt: Wow…that’ll be…interesting (weird foreign film festival alert!)…what film is it? (wincing)
Me: Hot Fuzz!
Cue lots of excited dancing up and down and girly squealing…and that was just Matt.
Yes, I finally won something! I entered a text competition in the Metro paper last week and yesterday evening I was sitting on the DART going home when I got a call to say I’d won two tickets to see a special screening of Hot Fuzz. Matt and I are huge fans of Shaun Of The Dead and had already marked their new film as one of the few that we would have to include in our ration of nights out this year. I’ll be smiling all day.
Those of you who know me in real life most likely already know that I spent a couple of years in my early twenties living in Mexico City. When I landed there at the age of 21 the full extent of my Spanish was the few words I’d picked up while watching Sesame Street as a child. So I knew that if I was ever to find myself crawling through a desert while in this huge city, I would be able to tell anyone I met that I wanted “Agua!” but that would be about it.
Almost straight away we (there were six of us) began our intensive Spanish lessons in the Berlitz language school. We attended these classes for four hours every weekday for about six months and I have to say that they were the best language classes I’ve ever had. I remember thinking that if Irish and French were taught using this method in Irish schools (no writing letters to imaginary pen friends and definitely no Peig Sayers!) I might have had a chance of actually learning those languages too.
Well, I say that the Berlitz classes were the best classes ever, in fact there was another method that I employed while living in Mexico that really helped me in getting to grips with Spanish. When we finally bought ourselves a small television after we’d been there almost a year I discovered the Mexican telenovela. I never persuaded any of my American roommates just how brilliant they were nor did they swallow my excuse that I was watching them for educational purposes.
The telenovela is often described as being a Latin-American or Spanish soap opera but really they’re not the same thing. They don’t usually run for more than a year so they’re more like a televised version of the old-fashioned serialised novels that Victorian newspapers used to do. The stories are always the same…beautiful girl from a wealthy family falls for caring, handsome but poor, and therefore unsuitable, cobbler/butcher/firefighter/circus performer or a variation on that theme and the main ingredient is plenty of melodrama…lots of evil step-mothers to slap young feisty heroines across the face. I loved them and would peer through the snowy reception straining to understand what on earth they were talking about. Plus they really did help me learn Spanish as it is spoken by everyday people…even if my vocabulary was a little unusual.
Well, the wonders of YouTube allowed me to have a little stroll down memory lane. So here’s a few of the best that I found and I hope you enjoy them. I mean…how could you not?
This last one is the original Colombian telenovela version of Ugly Betty which was brought to the US by Salma Hayek, obviously another telenovela fan: