Friday night, Oct. 5. Temperature: 18 degrees Celsius/ 64 degrees Fahrenheit

I hear rain falling on the roof, a lovely sound.

I got home late, close to 9 p.m. tonight. The blogging class I’m teaching to maestras y maestros at the Centro de Idiomas from 5 to 7 on Friday evenings ended early when the internet went down. We decided to take a break and see if internet access would be restored. (The coordinator, Miguel Angel Murrieta, has thoughtfully arranged for us to have coffee and cookies during our breaks.) And sure enough, the internet came back up briefly, giving us false hope, and then went down again. So we called it a day.

After that, I took a taxi from the school to the Chedraui supermercado closest to my apartment. When I emerged from the store about an hour later, the sidewalks and streets were wet. I don’t know if it had rained or if it was due to persistent chipi-chipi, the gentle drizzle that falls here, more a sprinkle or a mist than actual rain. I tried to catch another taxi home, not because I objected to walking but because I was heavy laden with groceries—my payday splurge—and my satchel of books that I carry to and from school each day.

But could I hail a taxi? No. In this city that has somewhere between 3,000 and 3,500 of them—countless of which passed me by as I trudged home—I couldn’t get a taxi because they were all taken by others. Only when I turned down my street, Guerrero, did two taxis appear with backseats empty. But it was too late by then. Ah, well. “All part of life’s rich pageantry,” as Inspector Clouseau would say.
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At noon today, there was a meeting of faculty and staff on the topics calidad and mejorar continuo—quality and continuous improvement. (Déjà vu all over again. CNM is using a similar quality perspective for its accreditation process.) I dropped into the meeting late and left early because I was preparing for my blogging class, but while I was there, I took these pictures.



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I was sick with a cold for three days this past week. I taught my classes, but on Tuesday and Wednesday, I left immediately afterward. I slept a lot, and today I feel cured.

Margarita—and other Mexicans—call this the season of contagion, la estación de contagio. The phrase has an ominous but somewhat romantic tone, bringing echoes of the winter of my discontent and one hundred years of solitude and love in the time of cholera.

Here in Xalapa, Margarita explained, September brings cooler weather—although the change has been barely perceptible to me so far—and sickness. And it's true: I counted five out of 16 students in my first class who were coughing and sneezing and blowing their noses along with me on Wednesday.
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Yesterday afternoon around 1:30 as I left the Centro de Idiomas for home, I saw a man sleeping on the street, stretched out full length close to the curb and adjacent to a portable stand where produce, herbs, and tortillas are sold. I assume he was one of the people who worked at the stand. I was amazed by the sight of him. I had to wonder(1) how could he sleep on the hard surface of the street? He didn’t seem drunk; his repose seemed deliberate, and the people sitting next to the stand seemed unperturbed by his presence or his slumber. (2) How did he dare fall asleep on the street knowing that pedestrians—let alone sleepers—are the targets of many taxistas and other drivers who seem hell-bent on scourging the streets of them? And (3) how could he rest while people walked past, beside, and around him?

I am always grateful to people like him whose behavior or appearance is so very different, in a harmless way, from what is normal, accepted, customary. I appreciate that they jerk me out of life's "terrible dailiness," and I admire their bravery, or bravado. I fondly remember the first time I saw a young punk-rocker sporting a pink 6-inch spiked mohawk and the time I saw an overweight middle-aged balding man waiting outside the Albuquerque Airport who was wearing Little Bo Peep garb, minus the bonnet and staff, lifting a hammy leg in white tights to rest his foot on a bench while he puffed on a cigar.

Maybe I like these people for the same reason I like mimes: they ask us to look at them. And they enterain us.