Over the past few days I haven´t been doing much but reading and playing the guitar. Thursday night there was a HUGE storm with lots of wind and rain and so Friday there were no kids around. I spent a good deal of time Friday in Ruth Ann´s apartment watching her DVDs of a season of the show "24".

I was reading "The Brothers Karamozov", but I got about 250 pages into and just got bored. I will probably finish it later on, but I had about all I could take of those people. Instead, I read "Certain Women" by Madeleine L'Engle and "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck, both good books about life and love and loss. And you can see how much time I had on my hands because I finished both, while also reading "Many Mexicos" by Lesley Byrd Simpson (?), a good comprehensive book on the history of Mexico if anyone is interested.

Other than that, not much has happened. I ventured out with Damaris last night to church. There was some special service going on that we didn´t know about, with a lot of local youths. After service they had tamales for sale, so of course i had to have one. It was entirely too spicy for me, but I ate it anyway.

Okay, Dr. Foltz, here is your anthropology stuff. I knew that I would need it, so i found some papers from Anthro class and looked over it this morning. One quite obvious separation of Male and Female is the genderization (is that a word?) of words. "Carro" is male, "Cocina" is female. Nouns are all male and female and therefore command their own "la" or "el" to proceed it, etc.

I don´t know exactly when it is, but here in Mexico there is a Day of the Dead that they celebrate (or rather, observe). I think it is either Halloween, November 1st or November 2nd. On that day I know that families honor the dead people in their families by visiting gravesites and other various things. This would be a great example of the separation of living and dead.

Diachronization of Synchrony. I don´t know if I have this one right, but here it is quite normal and not rude to be late to something, to make spontaneous plans, to not be so rigid about schedules. People arrive to work on time, church usually starts on time, etc. However, with friends, family and casual occasions there is not much worry or many rules about having to be exactly on time. To me this shows that normally the culture here would tell them that it would be perfectly fine to be late, however things like work and the diachrony of special situations have moved that cultural norm to its own casual existence. I hope that makes sense.

Ah. and my favorite: the connection between food and love. It is quite obvious here. Preparing the time old traditions of things like tamales and albondigas soup takes quite a bit of time. This time spent in the kitchen, like I mentioned in my last post, is spent with family members or friends, and I have yet to see or hear a woman complain about her work. It has actually made me like cooking and food preparation a little more than I used to. Avy, one of the girls I work with ALWAYS has food with her during the day and she is constantly offering me some. No matter what, she always offers me some of her food, and to me that shows a little love. Food here is a special part of their life, their existence, their socialization.

That´s all I have for now. Maybe more next time.