It is currently eight in the morning and another bright sunny day in central Mexico on the second floor of my aunt’s apartment overlooking the town while I wait for my jet-lagged family to wake up. I am scribbling this on a quaint grade school notebook that cost eleven pesos at the corner bodega, as well as with a mechanical pencil I bought for 400 yen in Osaka the year before (peak globalism). All that said, here are a few takeaways from my trip so far.
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I’m very glad I built up my patience and lowered my threshold for stimulation before the trip as part of my lifestyle. Part of the reason my older brother would get so irritated during these trips to the sticks, I can now see in hindsight, was because of the pervasive social emphasis on long periods of nothing and on leaving the day to chance. Fundamentally, people operate on the notion that there is always time to spare and therefore merely seek out ways here and there to fill it up; this is in contrast to the first-world industrial approach of feeling the opposite from the get go - that there is never enough time and sacrifices have to be made. People that don’t choose to drink the proverbial Kool-Aid would get restless pretty quickly and resort to reflexes such as flipping through their phone for the hundredth time.
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My Spanish ability is not up to par with what I had imagined. My biggest problem is thinking faster that I can speak and dropping phonemes in free variation in order to keep up with the general contour of the ideal sentence my mind lays down in real time - like railroad tracks in front of a moving train. This of course ends up being counterproductive as I have to repeat myself and speak slower anyway to get my point across, which by that point, loses all relevance (especially any attempt to be witty or funny). All those years of popcorn reading aloud in American grade school helped bridge that gap in my English production but makes my lack of intimate time with the Spanish language far more apparent. I might consider speech therapy or shadowing as methods to make these fine motor movements more automatic and one less thing I need to keep tabs on while functioning as a member of Mexican society. Writing prose in Spanish should also help with the other side - thinking in grammatically correct chunks automatically for when I need to use them. On the bright side, all this I can vision myself doing for the acquisition of Japanese as well, with probably a year or so of difference between my Japanese and Spanish ability. Of course, the biggest hurdle to overcome there is building an adequate mental heuristic of the correct and the incorrect, but once anyone does that, native output becomes an inevitability - first in spurts and then in torrents.
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I am very much still American in thought and behavior, despite how much I might have deluded myself in the past that I was a Mexican fish out of water. There are still many aspects of American culture that alienate or intimidate me, namely consumerism and covert eurocentrism (by no means unique to ‘murica), but all in all, I think I’d have an easier time adapting to rural America than I would to rural Mexico in my current state. I’d like to believe that the language barrier alone is to blame, but a part of me knows that there is a tangible difference in how a second generation immigrant sets up his life versus how the first generation does. I recall my band leader being able to distinguish a native-born Japanese person amidst a crowd just by the way they walk and the aura they give off.
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Wherever I go, people fall into the same negative thought patterns. While relatively fewer, there are still a fair share of wanna-be-rich status-seeking consoomers and even gender-bending purple-hairs lurking the streets of my mom’s hometown. Of course, I cannot speak for the boondocks yet, but I must remind myself that whatever insecurities I have about certain people are not going to magically go away by driving 2000 km south. I still have the responsibility of weighing the pros and cons of each region’s NPC and seeing who I and anyone else with a few narrow but intense interests would benefit mutually. So far, for better or for worse, the answer is the city slicker.
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Along a similar vein, going to a remote area with fewer chances of encounters would be courting suicide for anybody who still hasn’t worked through their mental inhibitions. If a man sees zero suitors in his home turf of a densely-packed metropolis, what makes him think that that number will be anything but zero especially without the advantages of similarity, shared experiences, and sheer number?
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What merits were there to eschewing all chances to meet new women in order to make more money? The main concern here is being so hellbent on having enough money to buy land and build a house while all the while being aware of social stagnation against the many milestones that cousins and nephews are fulfilling left and right. That highlights one of the only benefits to a past lifestyle of bugmanism - having had the time and mental space to make friends and understand women better; that is the default social mode these days. The age-old paradox emerges - if an older person could somehow merge their current conservative wisdom with the luxury of time they had before, that would be perfect. And on the topic on the absolute value of money, is it possible to escape the rat race of lifestyle creep (with a primarily social factor) only to enter the rat race of poverty (with a primarily economic factor)? “Next up on my project list is to add a second floor to my log cabin that took ten years to finance. Time to live in my car for the next ten years!” and the like. In the first place, just how much can someone rely on land ownership and a lack of rent to be what “saves” them from poverty and what secures them the free time to build community and feel confident enough to go out and talk to women?
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Am I being selfish in robbing any future children I have of the opportunities I myself had growing up by choosing to homeschool them in the countryside? Sure, they’ll be less prone to vices (or so I think; alcoholism is rampant in the country) and consumerist tendencies, but they also won’t have as many organized music performances to take part in - performances that in hindsight probably served as some form of self-propelling indoctrination (more on that later) but that also led to the most formative experiences of my life. Maybe my worries are unfounded and there are better ways to prevent the corruption of my family?
As you may have garnered, this trip was primarily meant to gauge my living prospects for the future. It sure would be nice to ask those questions right now to the person who has the other 50% stake in that future, but life is seldom that easy and all I can do is revel in the uncertainty and plan according to what someone like that might say. I have to be content with a few immediate goals filling the void - moving into a house I own that I can truly call a place of my own. Everything else can come afterwards, but having a home base is Stage 1 for someone learning the ropes of self-sustainability. That in itself carries a lot of smaller goals - like learning basic carpentry, welding, car maintenance, plumbing, strength training, self defense, etc. There is plenty to do. Even if that means I’m the only person working on this project for the next ten years, I’ll have no doubt that I’ll be working towards the best version of myself I can envision.