I've gotten used to a lot of things here (I can even drink the tap water), but the yappy-ass dog pictured above is not one of them. Seriously, this poor dog is permanently marooned on the bleeding roof with nothing to do but bark at literally *anything* that passes by his house, be that a person, fellow dog, car, or just trash caught in the breeze. Can you tell what he's barking at in that picture? That's right, the answer is nothing.
I alternate between feeling pity for his boring existence and wanting to fly a 747 into his obnoxious face. Every night he gets into a righteous yapping-match with my host-family's own canine waste of space, whose name is Yago. As I write this, he is still barking at me for taking the following picture of him:
Between the two of them, the mosquitoes, and the petroleum delivery truck that drives around blasting its jingle at all hours of the morning, I haven't been getting much sleep. Yago lives below my window, which means that every time he senses my presence he barks for at least five minutes. I've contemplated poisoning him with the bug spray they gave me, but Lorencito loves the stupid thing, and I would probably get found out anyway.
Apparently Lorenzo has had Yago a long time, and once, when they were both very young, they saw a ghost. According to Lorenzo, he awoke to Yago barking and saw the silhouette of girl dressed like Christina Ricci in the Addam's Family Movie (his words, not mine). He remembers her vividly at the foot of his bed, giggling, as she reached towards him to pull him into Underworld before Yago scared her off. "Animals can see these things more than we can," he told me.
This story comes from perhaps the most rational, level-headed Mexican guy I've ever met, and it illustrates just how mystical their world-view is. Shayla and her boyfriend, Jaunito (pictured below) also told stories like this about encounters with the dead, and I don't mean to judge them at all. Far from it, I find their certainty in these concepts to be almost refreshing.
This weekend I'm headed to Porta Vierte with Paulina, which is perfect timing, because I desperately need to get out of Morelia for a bit. As always happens in these situations, us students are past the euphoric "getting to know each other, together" period of bonding. Petty rivalries have arisen, and we're now dividing into groups according to who-gets-along-with-who-gets-along-with-who. I rarely fare well during this period, since I'm so eager to befriend everybody that I don't fit anywhere once the battle lines are drawn.
To top all that off, I necked with a girl from Riverside over the weekend in a night of various drunken mistakes, and she's now giving me a thorough education in the art of the brush-off. She has a boyfriend, and I guess she thinks I want a relationship or something (she doesn't know about Paulina), so she has to be a bitch so I won't get the wrong idea. I'm dangerously close to another rant about American girls, so I'll stop.
Luckily, I've got a solid buddy in Angelo, who shares my love of 80's punk rock and the band life. I first referred to him as Shaggy Hippie Dude, but he got a haircut and he was never really a hippie, so I feel obligated to drop it.
2 comments:
God I hate that yappy dog, youll find it in every corner, on every rooftop behind every fence, it just barks at you, over and over and over; permeating 31 states and 1 federal district with its piercing high pitched bark. The true reason why i migrated to el Norte
This is Alex btw
I'm glad someone else understands my pain. I was starting to get the point of thinking the dog was just a figment of my imagination, following me into my dreams and subconscious like the remnants of a bad LSD trip...
...so how's it going, Alex?
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