Because its Monday

After an unintentional hiatus, I decided to come back on to the keyboard and type something that had nothing to do with Immigration Law. So here I am.
After this unintentional hiatus, I have come to appreciate my blog, my rough and unedited writing, and to toot my own horn.

While I was gone, I received the news that someone I love is dying faster than I would want them to go. It's a certainty that we will die, but the time frame is what I hate. This dwelling on time forced me to dwell on this word we use, "love".
I had a grandmother that died almost three years ago. It was sad, a lot of people cried. But in an effort to maintain transparency, I only cried because she was my father's mother. Yes, in the last years of her life I had gotten to know this woman through and through, more so than when she was virilent. But it was not until she was close to the end that she seemed to care on who I was and whether or not I came to see her. It was nice to see her so humbled, and in turn, creating an emphatic and humbling experience within me. But the day she died, it was not sadness for me or for my loss, but a sadness for my father who's complex relationship with his own mother has yet to be unearthed. I often wondered if he was sad, regretful, angry? But I have never dared to ask him. And it was for those reasons that I was sad, that I cried. Not for the love of a woman, but for the selfish answers that I will never have answered, and for the father who couldn't seem to bring himself to visit his own mother in life.

Now it is me that is legitimately crying. This will be the first "family" member that I have loved, and will now lose. Perhaps I have lost this person a long time ago. I had stopped my frequent visits to Texas years ago, and only recently resumed on a vacation a few months ago. A wave of guilt went over me. These were people I loved, that loved me. These were people that were excited to receive my call, and embraced me with the largest hugs I have ever felt. And now one of them is leaving sooner than I would want.
I got to visit with him one last time. He sat up at the table, proudly showed off his PICC Line, and told me how the next time I visited, he was going to kill and grill a goat in my honor. He still looked the same, just slightly slower and with a bit more white hairs. That is how I want to keep it.

You will have to excuse the "dear diary" entry. But its been quite some time and there is so much I want to say. I will have to cut it here. I can't seem to continue without shedding a tear.

Travel Tuesday: Bathrooms in Mexico

It was suggested to me by Running Mama to start a Travel Tuesday entry on my blog  where I save the best of the traveling stories for that particular day. Since I am rotten at organizing my thoughts and stories, I couldn't help but jump on the suggestion...so here it goes.

It was my good fortune that I was invited to join my aunt and uncle on their annual drive to my uncle's home town of Curimeo, Michoacan Mexico, December of 2011. As it turns out...regardless of where...I love to travel, and a road trip in to Mexico was an experience for the bucket list. I have visited Mexico many times before, and with the exception of one trip to Chichen Itza, my trips were typically in to small towns, immersing in to the everyday culture. So when I was told that I would be hitting up cities and towns on my three day drive, places I had yet to see, I was ecstatic. Not to mention that I would be staying in a very small town once arriving...I thought the experience would be excellent fodder for a book that I will never write.

Being the small town that it is, Curimeo has roads that were barely  wide enough for the Texas size truck we had, but we said fuck it. Upon arrival in to the town, my  first site was the guy with a tequila in one hand, and the reins of his horse in the other. I thought, yes, this is true Mexico. It was great and fucking inspiring. I wanted to ride a horse and drink my tequila at the same time. One fucking day...

My uncle and aunt are building a house in this town. But because this town is so small we would have to go two towns over to buy materials for its construction. So one day while we were running errands, we decide to have a Michoacan style torta ahogada. Now for you non mexi's, torta ahogadas are a Jalisco delicacy, not a Michocan one. But I said fuck it, and ate one anyway at the local eatery. Almost immediately I felt the rumble...a slight stirring in my lower bowels, a dance upon my intestines. We get in the truck and descend down towards home base.

It was about half way in to the truck ride that I thought, shit...I am about to shit. I turn to my aunt and say, "Tia, I have to go, get my ass back to the house." I was clenching with all of my might but I knew that clench could hold out for so long. I had to go in the worst way. This "going" was going to be fucking epic too. So I turn to my aunt again and say "get me to the fucking house". Now, because we had taken the three day road trip down to Mexico, we had equipped the car with rolls of toilet paper, in case we had to stop and take a piss along the road. I had never factored in taking a shit along the road. So my aunt, fully aware of the toilet paper availability, pulls the truck over...on a driveway...with some random home only fifty yards away, and says to me "just go here". Now at this point my ass was in so much pain. It was holding back the literal shit storm ready to reign over this poor souls driveway. I will be honest, the prospect of relief was a moment of euphoria for me. But no, the thought of my ass spewing over someone's driveway was too much to bare, and the fact that this was broad fucking daylight on a road that was traveled often fucking enough to catch me shitting. I climb back and clench so much harder...

The home that was under construction was located at the entrance of Curimeo, and therefore would be   one of the first houses driving in to town. I ask her to stop at their house, the one that was under construction. With a chuckle, Tia tells me "There is no running water, we have to go to your uncle's mother's house." FML.  We continue to drive in to the town, you know, the one with the narrow fucking streets. Well on this particular day, some asshole decided to have a party and shut the one fucking street down...the one street. We had to go around, park a Mexican block away. I didn't even let her stop the truck, I jumped off and ran towards the house, tripping over the cobblestone and running through the tape that shut down the streets....

I didn't exactly make it....I am not the most graceful traveler...

Not so Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

I am the oldest by six years. This meant that my summers were spent terrorizing my younger siblings in to playing school, where I was the evil head master and they were disgusting and vile students. I was such a shit to them, they had no choice but to play outside and entertain me because until July rolled around, I was stuck in a backyard filled with chickens, goats, and some cactus...this is downtown San Jose, California by the way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk7uXaNuWNEBut then the end of June/beginning of July would roll around. You see, from the age of 8 up until my quinceanera, I had the good fortune of being shipped to Texas. I realize how ass backwards this may sound...."good fortune" and "Texas" do not typically jive in the same sentence. But to me, this was all I could think or talk about.

My godparents moved to Texas when I was seven years old. They had a ranch about an hour south of Austin. But it might have been hours and hours away because most of my time was spent on that ranch in a town that was notorious for its great pecan...I wish I was joking. But it didn't bother me because I was care free, kid free, and my days were spent watching Mexican smut television and eating my godmother's home made tortillas. As to why I wasn't a tumbler is beyond me. My tummy days came way later. We would take a drive in to town, blasting Selena y los dinos, or some other tex-mex station. One year, at the age of thirteen, I earned my right of passage and was allowed to drive the truck from town to the ranch...I didn't kill anyone...but I did scare the shit out of everyone in the car. It should also be noted that my driving skills come from learning to drive in a monster truck on the solitary highway of Texas....so yeah...

Once in a while when my aunt Linda was in town we would take a trip down to Corpus Christi, where we would try to swim in an ocean but couldn't because of the warm salt water scratching the sight out of my eyes. Also, my aunt and godmother don't swim...so I would have been fucked. Other times we would drive to Mexico, spend the day in Piedras Negras buying candy and eating tacos from the street vendors.

I have spent a lot of summers in other places in the world. But I have to admit, Texas is place I loved to be.