Requisites, Rulers, and Riots.

Requisites.
Funky Friday. You can funk with me on Friday. But just on Friday. And in this way, I like to start my Friday mornings off with a little bit of funk. I crank the Maceo Parker and do my morning media monitoring. Isn’t it amazing how influential music can be on your mood? After a bit of head bobbing to music and reading the daily news, I proceed to get serious. No matter if the music is still on or not, I keep rhyme to the sounds in my head and the bobbing continues.

Snoozing. Every night before I go to bed I set my cell phone alarm to wake me up. I put it across the room so as to guarantee that I get up to turn it off. Every morning I get out of bed, walk across the room, pick up my cell phone, try to turn it off, eventually end up hitting snooze, bring it back to bed with me, and cuddle with my cell phone until it obnoxiously rings again five minutes later. For the first time, I looked down at my cell rather than fumbling around blindly in the darkness. After I hit snooze it said “snoozing,” as though snoozing is the gerund form of snooze. Well, I guess everyday I am snoozing it until I can’t snooze it no more. Today I was snoozing especially late.

BBQs. It’s spring time here in Mexico City. You may not have realized that because you are still frozen in your respective parts of the world, or perhaps because the weather hasn’t changed all that much here. It’s still cool in the mornings and evenings, and hot during the day. Of course, when it’s sunny and gorgeous, we have to have bbqs on the terrace. Gringo-style.

Vendors Voices. In order to be a vendor and sell anything in this country you must have an awkward and unique sound. To be successful at selling tamales, cooked bananas, phone cards, or anything else, your voice must be high pitched, scratchy, and cartoon-like. My favorite is the TelCel phone card guy. I have to buy phone cards for my cell phone and I always go to Pepe. First of all, to sell TelCel cards you have to wear an all neon yellow full-body suit that resembles the outfits that NASCAR drivers wear that are covered in advertisements. You can spot these human highlighters at every major intersection. Pepe asks, “taaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrr-jeta amigo?” This memorable question starts off low, and then he shoots three octaves up and climaxes on the “A-M-I.” He man is a walking cartoon. And the mustache is just plain unbelievable. Thank you Pepe, thank you very much.

Rulers: Free-hand it.
Having worked in a various other offices, I have become accustomed with the inventories of staplers, staple removers, tape dispensers, white out, highlighters, pens, scissors, hole punch, etc that all other work places have. In Mexico, many of these items are overlooked and not stocked. When something is not around, you usually don’t find a use for it and just make do. However, if you are new to this type of office setting, it is very clear when something is missing and your need for it is intolerable.

Isabel’s office just hired a new German. As this more than slightly anal individual was preparing a chart labeling the desks of all of his co-workers, he chirped up, “where is my ruler?” Isabel turned her head a little and looked at him curiously, “excuse me?” He repeated himself in a less than pleasant tone.

Isabel pondered the question with her finger covering her mouth. She thought to herself, “I have never asked for, or needed a ruler.” Then, she realized that if she ever needed to draw a straight-line, she would just free-hand it. That’s Mexico, you just free-hand it.

When your boss rushes in with an urgent assignment, you listen and take the project. With your boss still looking over your shoulder, you finish typing the email to Bryan about that crazy night in the club. Urgency and efficiency are relative here. You just free-hand it.

Riots: Damn the man, save the empire.
Let me say this, Mexicans are not Argentines. In Argentina the people love to riot. It is fun. It is passionate. It is part of their culture. They would sing, make banners, and yell a lot. It is like Pep Club: they would make signs, write songs, and dress up.

Here, it is less fun. It is more dangerous and serious. The way a protest should be. When Mexicans get pissed off enough to organize and leave work early, they are gonna break stuff. It is a lot of work to arrange a protest, and honestly, Mexicans are generally a bit too apathetic and lazy to do that. So, when I read in the paper that the International Water Forum was coming to Mexico and people were mad about the potential privatization of water, it was clear that the populace was gonna respond. And respond they did. They flipped. For a whole week.

On the first day, the government brought in the army. And positioned dozens of soldiers all over the neighbor I work in, Polanco. This was in the middle of the protest march. Everyone was let out of work at 2pm to avoid the protest that began at 4pm. My co-workers were dead serious when they told me to go home. “Don’t dawdle around here, go right home.” I asked them, “what are you going to do?” I knew they weren’t joking when they responded with, “I’m getting out of here as soon as possible.”

I went to a non-threatening neighborhood, had a long lunch with friends, and went home to take a nap. I roused at 7:30pm and motivated enough to go to the gym with Filipito and Isabel. We left the house at 8:15pm and exited the metro in Polanco to find the streets empty. It was eerie - a ghost town in a place that has the worse traffic in the world.

We didn’t think too much about it and arrived at our packed gym. After about 45 minutes, the gym cut the lights off and rushed everyone away from the windows and into a back room. They explained to us that the protesters were breaking windows and looting. I couldn’t believe it. They were still out in full force 6 hours later!

When we were finally permitted to leave the luxury gym in a posh neighborhood, the air outside was foreboding and ominous. The streets were still empty and only a few random people could be seen outside.

What have we learned? Well, first off, I am going to miss the tacos out of Mexico. I love it here. I love the maíz smells on the way to work, the torta de tamale that represents my second daily breakfast, the gel, the NFL apparel, the green “kidnapping” taxis, everything. We also learned that music is very important in life, on the job, and especially on Fridays, bbqs are one of little things that make nice weather even more enjoyable, cartoon characters actually exist and work for the informal Mexican economy, rulers and white out are really unnecessary, and a pissed off Mexican is a dangerous Mexican. The end.