Sigh... Stretch... Sigh...

Mmmm... I'm getting all comfortable-like around here. I have decided to look for an apartment in a charming neighborhood, figure the most inviting dancfloors for each expertly performed musical niche I need satisfied, and of course, seek out a good local psychiatrist. If it seems like it will take longer than the next two months for either myself or my legal representative to receive ALL of my medical records so as to proceed through the Social Security benefits system, then I will seek out a Ph.D. program or maybe a highly nerdy occupation here in order to be able to stay here past three months with a proper and legal visa. I may insist on always doing whatever I damn well please, but I am always law-abiding about it.

Alright, here we go with the absurdities of what it is like for me to try to communicate with anybody right now that I cannot manage to see live and in person! I am in a foreign country, so my cellphone that has no international calling capabilities has not even been activated since the fifth of February. Naturally, this means that I procured a calling card for the local payphones that I have still only used successfully to call my mother's cellphone. I can sometimes get through to my parents' landline if I use the phone from my hotel room, but there is no guarantee. They really are the only people I have attempted to call except for one short attempt to call a local number that actually connected me with a fax machine. Huh, that seems to be the joy of international phone systems... when I use them.

I have also tried sending emails, but instead of reaching my friends, I ended up emailing back and forth with a long line of US federal agents who thought that somehow they could pretend to have had as long an understanding of my sense of humor with me as my real friends have. Not that I don't mind finally receiving an email or two, but please just be honest with me and spell out what you actually need me to talk to you about. Prevaricating about the bush pretending to be people you probably have never met in the first place is no way to do anything but politely invite me to toy with you. You handed me the strings. All I did was giggle while I pulled them. But thanks, it was kinda fun.

Facebook has been odd... What is the deal with all of the photos of people with flames pouring forth from their hands? Is it in reference to "Krull"? Oh, and the lack of actual communication with me through that particular interface? Am I supposed to believe that Syniva actually traveled to San Francisco and never told me about it when she got home? This stuff is just makes me scream "Seriously?" all over the place.

I have no idea if my casual, everyday, nobody-has-killed-me-yet snail-mail actually gets through since I do not have a reliable return mail address and since I mailed all of the letters too recently for them to get there anyway. So, I tapped into my internalized knowledge of other cultures to send letters through embassies while I am here. Yes, it is an ESSENTIAL part of French culture to deliver a love letter from one world famous lover to another especially when the two (oh so romantically) still have never met each other despite never giving up. Yes, it is an ESSENTIAL part of British culture to deliver an expertly crafted Shakespearean sonnet (written in less than ten minutes over bistec and cactus tacos at a taqueria in México City) from an English language author to a Shakespearean actor. These moments are matters of pride for these cultures. Also, volleying logical possibilties back and forth before smapping a stamp on an envelope for a win to get a letter to a cultural ambassador from the world of sports to the world of art who happens to be a Swiss national is pretty much the only way the Swiss Embassy would have wanted that letter to get through at all, too.

I cannot believe the only way I have left to reliably get a message to ANYONE involves lots of envelopes, taxi rides, foreign diplomats, pulling on gates when the locks buzz, and speaking through intercoms... but you know what, if that is the only way to send mail at all, YES I will do it. I have this things with needing to write and communicate.

As for real live human interactions with the people of this fair city... as far as I can tell, the only thing they are allowed to acknowledge about me at all is that I am freedom fighter self-exiled from the US in order to bring an end to the faschist regime running that once great country. Have I told you yet how hard it is to communicate with people in the US even when you are in there yourself? In order to get off the ground at all to fly here, the certain subset of the US executive branch forced the foreign airline using the domestic airport to give me a specific meal with what they seem to have been told were "magic mushrooms" in it. This is a GREAT story, but sadly, you'll have to ask me how that story ends sometime when the public is allowed to have conversations about actual things, again. (Tease, tease.)

Oh, and whoever arranged a long line of crotch shots of Colin Farrell to be flashed through my dedicated television broadcast while I ate dinner, thank you. It is always when the weird things take me by surprise to make me feel loved that I emit the highest quantity of giggles. Hee-hee.

And before I go out into the many people of La Ciudad de México to see what sort of things that don't make sense are going to happen next, I would like to leave with the only film reference I know of that uses "Scheherezade" by Rimsky-Korsakov.