I want to love you madly, I want to love you now. – CAKE

When I was 18 I went to Mexico City on a whim. Not my own whim, but the whim of my friend Mariko, who entreated me one evening over IM to join her there. I asked why. She said because it was awesome. I trusted her judgment on these things, so I begged my parents to scrape the money together and, at the end of the summer after high school graduation, I went to DF with my, unbeknownst to me then, crazy pointless-adventure-soul-mate Annie.

Most of you, I think, know this about me. It is my “Big Thing.” That whole year is a haze of memories of Mexico, of being miserable and in love, of being exhaustedly, brilliantly in love, of being lost and finding the rest of the wide world. Of jungles and deserts and arid highlands bathed in mist. Of being within spitting distance of the sun, flying too high and being burned, of running to the sea, of drowning myself in forgetting.

At least, that’s how I remember it. The journal shows me just how much processing I’ve done:

Ah, how relative the concept of "smelly" is...

Clearly, life then was not all Iris-Murdoch-novel all the time. A lot of it was waiting for the crappy washing machine in the hostel, uselessly trying to say things in Spanish, and being prissy about goddamn near everything. The thing that struck me most about my old self, however, was how much of myself I kept from myself. I was coy about writing things in my journal, about how quickly I mentioned them, for instance… as if I were going to trick my future self into thinking I was more mature and awesome than I really was. As far as current me is concerned, I just come off as even more painfully self-aware than I’d ever realized.

I planned for this to be exciting to discover for my 30 year-old-self... I'm only 27, but my heart did race with glee...

And then in the back of the journal was this little chimpmunk-like stash of bits and bobs. Bus insurance stubs ( I was a bit obsessed with these… they seemed so excessively morbid), metro tickets, the side of a KFC box (nadie hace pollo como Kentucky!), a metro map, pamphlets, a business card for a a crazy dog trainer we met at the beach (you may vaguely note that there is a bear in the left-hand corner of that business card, because that makes total sense…).

Awesomest of all is that green friendship bracelet. When I tell people about this now it seems cheesy, but ten years ago, at least, it was cool for people our age in Mexico City to go to the Coyacan market and get these, together and to give to their friends. There was nothing cheesy about it. Annie and I got these green ones. Mine broke off the day before I flew into Mexico City for spring break the following spring.

It sounds crazy, but it was an omen. Things changed forever. That spring break was my crazy love story week, and Pepe gave me a bracelet when I gave up the ghost. People always think that sounds, I don’t know, trite? Cheesy? It was the most romantic thing ever, people. And that bracelet, it broke off the day I arrived in Mexico City that summer. Like, I walked in the hostel, before I even met up with Pepe and everything started unraveling, and it just fell off of my arm. Then, of course, the long lost weekend of a summer began… but the unraveling started, quite literally, when that bracelet left my arm. His was white and cream.

So, the bracelets, I had forgotten I still had the first one. It was like finding a magic amulet or something, a real treasure. Rediscovering all of that, reading the ramblings produced by my ridiculous, ebullient, hopeful, lusty-for-life 18-year-old self as she literally came to life for the first time, well, no wonder I looked slightly crazy in the Heine Brothers.

And that quote at the beginning of this post, well, that started playing as I started writing… I played that song ad naseum as I wrote emails to Pepe. I think I really felt the sentiment toward life and I just took it out on him.

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Unrelatedly, I need to add a tiny rant on my current reading. Why are philosophers such goddamn bad writers? I realize a lot of what I’m reading are actually notes put together from various talks, but seriously, when you stop to write it down, that’s the time to make it clear. I think a lot of people don’t want to admit they find philosophic works to be incomprehensible because they assume that they are not smart enough for them, or afraid that someone else will level that accusation at them.

But I say, no. I’m comfortable enough with my intellectual capabilities. My reading comprehension is pretty goddamn good, by all accounts. In fact, about 70% of what I’m reading is fine and I am generally coming out with meaningful, useful insights. But, “Nothing less than the dissimulation of the dissimulated in totality, the dissimulation of what-is-as-such i.e. the mystery,” is the most gobbledygook piece of nonsense I have ever read, no matter what the hell it means. The philo-speak functions like some kind of secret code to keep out the uninitiated and it is FAIL. So, end rant.