The Good Life

If one is overwhelmed by his city life, by the dailies of society, by the toils, he may decide to leave town for a spell, perhaps for the coast. He will tell his boss that he needs some time off, maybe just a Friday so as to stretch the weekend, or a whole week even, if he has the guts to tear himself away from the grind for this long. He will then drive his car or catch a plane to a smaller beach town, one with hammocks and views and cocktails garnished with friut, and he will fill himself with deserved relaxation and clear his head of worries for these days in the sun.

I have fled Oaxaca city (although there is hardly a ¨daily grind¨ or a sense of city stress in this old and peaceful place that centers itself around its reposed zocalo) for the beach like a businessman. I took an eight hour busride that wound through the tropical fantasy of the mountains surrounding Oaxaca, and emerged from the jungle onto Mezunte, a town with less than a thousand inhabitants but feels like less than this, where the bungalos are folded like leaves into the hillside and the water is a temperature that does not change with the time of day, which means it is always perfect.

I am perfectly relaxed here in Mezunte, where all temperatures are temperate and concerns are of no concern.

So than why, with the breeze sweeping through the dusty room where I type, beckoning me to relax in the sunshine, am I here thinking, writing, trying to alphebetize and categorize that which goes on in a town such as this? Why am I imposing a certain sense of judgement (or perhaps just attempting to intellectualize) the very nature of this place, and with that the very nature of something that interests me greatly: The Beach Town.

The Beach Town is not meant for intellectualizing. One is convinced (either by fellow beach bums or by the simple and convicting natural elements of sun, sky, water) that one does not have to think about anything but what surround them, about how happy they are in this place of paradise, and how lucky. One is to read at the beach, but only for pleasure, and even then is convinced to pin his bookmark on the pages of his romance novel in order to take a dip in the green waters or to order another cocktail from the tiki bar. The beach is what is important, and when one is at the beach one must admit that they (and their turning mind) are small and insignificant (less than a sparkle in the water, even) in a world that provides us with such grand scales of beauty. Because of this, the beach itslef becomes the excuse for idle and lazy days and thoughts.

Those that choose to move to a beach town are those who have chosen to conquer the dream of ¨the good life,¨those who crave simplicity and those who do not know where else they might go. These are the people who have refused to succumb to the sadnesses that live in the city, and have also refused to admit that these sadnesses exist. The beach dwellers arrange their houses very simply, always with windows that look onto the sea, and allow themselves long hours of simple living each day.

But here is the question: is the beach just an evasion, much like all of the distractions that appear in the city, from the tribulations of ¨the real world¨? Is seeking the good life simply avoiding real life? When one moves to the beach do they not feel the current of sadness that blows in the breezes there? Do they bury the contradictions of those beach flats, those desperate salty neighborhoods, those people whose life this REALLY is, the sun thinning their skin?

And this is the reality of beach towns: contradictions. There seems to be a terrific pull between what is modern and outdated, what is open minded and what is closed, and between the people, divided into camps along the shore. It seems that beach towns pride themselves in a modern and liberal attitude, a relaxed (and this is often forced) acceptance of existence and of people, etc. etc. Yet in beach towns I have seen the strongest hatred towards outsiders (they might steal the waves from the locals or perhaps soak in too much of their sunlight) and I have seen the strongest divisions between camps of people. I have seen fights break out on the sand over which part of Santa Cruz was whose, I have seen San Diego locals force boogie boarders out of ¨their¨water with their fists (okay, okay, I would kick a boogie boarder out of my house, too, but this is beside the point). How does one explain the contrast between this closed-mindedness and the point of the beach, which is to be open?

Not to mention, how does one explain that people in beach towns all over the world are still dressing as if it were the late eighties (I´ll be nice and give them early nineties)? Are beach towns really that outdated, that separated from the places where there are fashion magazines and skinny jeans, that they cannot move away from neon? This is a sidenote, but a very important one...

In Mezunte there are all of these contradicitions and there are all of these simplicites. There is the steady pulse of the hours that are marked by the entering and exiting of the ocean, a coming and going that feels both repetative and necessary, like the moving of ants carrying food. There are the small tribes of people with their common affinities for slow movements and salty hair and their mutual hatreds for certain others on the beach and all of their small dramas that play out in the later hours at the single bar agains the hill. The conversations revolve around the water, its temperature and temper, and the clouds or the lack of clouds that shape the day. (These conversations move fluidly in four or five different languages, for everyone has moved here from somewhere else, yet somehow they always sound the same.) These conversations say: where are you from, lets go for a swim under the moon, and you are beautiful, but none of this matters either, since no one will be here for long.

I cannot say that Mezunte does not keep me content, because I am utterly free of desires, regrets, attacks of worry or concern here. Yet I can admit to the fact that there are discrepancies in the soul of this place, about the way people are living, the way they want to be living, and how they think they are living. I can see this when I see the anxious glow of a television on the pedestal of a plastic table, flickering inside one of the shacks on the hill, bringing news from faster places. I can see this in the cracks in the concrete, the dust on the plastic chairs, and also in the ocean, which is perfect but maddening, pulling you at the ankles until you turn small.

The businessman will come here on his long weekend, gain a tan and a sense of calm, and perhaps he will find that all places are part of the good life, or that no places are at all. Perhaps he will free himself of dramas, or perhaps he will fill himself with new questions that are more simple, more grand, and as consuming as the beach itself.

And maybe none of this will happen, I should go now, it is time for a drink and a rest in my hammock, I must not think much more than this.

On Mexico and Malthus

Thomas Malthus has been credited for his groundbreaking and dismal views on world population growth. Go on, think back European History class in high school and Intro to Economics in college and all the other times you have read and re-read about Malthus and his geometric growth rate and just think about it for a minute. Remember? The frogs and lily pads analogy? And how soon there will not be enough lily pads and too many frogs and we are all fucked, thanks to Malthus? Think about our food supply, struggling like a caboose to keep up with our hungry, multiplying mouths, and think about its pathetic arithmetic growth rate. You will think about it as you read this and then you will remember Thomas Malthus was an upperclass douche bag who had three kids of his own and proposed that the poor class do all the abstaining and the contracepting and that the poor classes withstand the plagues and the deaths due to hunger and the misery that would necessarily reduce population and you will find yourself back where you started, not wanting to think about using up anything or abstaining from anything, and you will go about your day.

It was not until last week that I thought about Thomas Malthus (or population at all for that matter) in a non-scholastic environment. It was my last day in Mexico City and I had to catch a plane to Oaxaca later that evening. To get to the airport I decided to take the metro so as to save the cash on a taxi. But on the platform, waiting for the pink line, were swarms of people like locusts or seagulls or cattle, smacking at each other for spots closer to where the door might open. I could not make my way to the front of the group, especially with my backpack (weighing in a whopping 37 pounds). When a train would come there would be a surge of physical force from the group of people, a push towards the subway door. There was an urgency and a sense of frantic pressure that frightened me, the way one is frightened of a swarm of locusts or a heard of cattle, the feeling that you may be overtaken by something that is larger than yourself. (I have felt like this in the ocean when the waves are strong or there is a rip current and I know that I do not have any power but to swim sideways, with the grain of the tide, and be naturally set free.)

I missed four trains before I caught one to the airport, and when I did it was so filled with people that I felt that there was no air.

This was when I thought about Malthus, about the sheer pressure of population on given resources, and this is the only time I could feel that there were 20 million people living in the Federal District of Mexico.

Mexico City is one of the oldest and most continuously inhabited cities in the world. It has been attracting people for hundreds of years: Aztecs, Spaniards, Olympiads, tourists. But since 1950, with the grey boom of industrial growth, the population has risen from 3 million to nearly 20 million. This is big. This is Malthusian. This is geometric.

From the airplane, when flying into Mexico City International Airport, one can not see where the city ends. Beneath you are only buildings. Beneath you is society, movement, chaos, cars and their smog, and millions and millions of people. You cannot see where the people end and you cannot fathom where they start. Beneath the plane is the biggest city in the world, one that Malthus might use as an example in one of his writings, pointing with a stick to the uphill diagonal growth line on the city´s flow chart.

But you know what? Fuck Malthus. My time in Mexico City may have been short (and well financed enough to avoid more instances of crowding like the metro), but what amazed me about the biggest city in the world was just what was so frightening about it: its neverending mass of humans. Its population. Its people. Amidst the enormous discrepancies of the rich and the poor, amongst the barrios full of beggars and the posh streets of San Angel and the dingy, dimly lit rooms of Hostel Amigo (if you ever stay there make sure to avoid the hostel bartender at all costs, he will force tequilla down your throat and make you addicted to spicy bar nuts) I was so impressed with the richness of the population of Mexico City that I hardly noticed that I was only one in twenty million.

Malthus wrote that in order to curb the population growth that would one day outrun our food supply we would need to count on misery (by this he meant war, famine, etc.) and moral restraint (meaning no S.E.X.) to be the barricades for the bomb of overpopulation. He also counted on the inevitablilty of vice among humans (ie. murder, infanticide, and homosexuality) to kill some people off. But he also knew that the poor would be the ones going hungry and fighting in wars. He outright denied the idea of ¨moral restraint¨ by having enough sex to produce three children of his own and he opposed the idea of contraception entirely. He assumed himself above any vices and saved those de-population teqniques for those that did not have as much education or class or ¨moral restraint¨as he.

Isn´t Mexico city, a place ridden with the bile of 20 million people and the smog of 3 and a half million cars and simultaneously studded with the gargantuan houses of the richest of Mexico, a fantastic tribute to the idea that overpopulation must be physically dealt with by the poor? We may arithmetically run out of food, yes, but does this mean we will ever stop distributing what we do have unfairly? Because of overpopulation, Mexico City suffers countless urban problems, poor housing, inadequate sanitation, and horrific polution. But there are still fucks like Thomas Malthus sitting in their writing rooms, calling for their children.

On that subway ride full of people I cried. I cried because I was so uncomfortable I thought I might die, I cried because a man behind me pinched my ass, and I cried because I realized that people rode this subway everyday, on their way out of the city, to places that were not so crowded and grey. I cried, also, because I was a part of a population, a population that was all enduring the same rough moment, and this was both happy and geometrically sad.

The Federal District

In Mexico City
I live as the dog lives:
panting through barrios,
aging and eating,
uncomfortable in the heat.
The flies come
and the smells come
but I am pleasant.
Tired, sometimes,
and patient,
with no one calling for me.
My purpose: a dog's purpose.
To watch the humans,
to breathe and to be whistled for,
to be ignored,
and to be treated well.

Ladies of Laughter

"I don't know many funny women." A male friend told me yesterday. He was driving me downtown.
"That's because women aren't supposed to be funny," I told him, a matter of fact. "People don't expect it."
"You're funny," he said.
"I know," I said. "Which is great, because women aren't supposed to be funny."
My friend laughed, changed lanes, and kept on.

Downtown we met friends for drinks at the Red Room. I felt anxious so I ordered a gin martini and we sat in a booth in the back with a table that had one leg shorter than the other. It was almost a double date because there were two boys and two girls and we were in a booth in the back and I kept picking out songs on the jukebox. I was anxious because we were going to see a movie that I didn't want to see, a comedy, and I didn't feel like wasting time.

"Can't we just stay here and hang out?" I pleaded to the corny contingent of double daters, plucking at the olives in my drink with their stick. "Why do we have to go to this fucking movie and waste twenty fucking dollars on tickets and two hours of our time and 300 calories on popcorn and bunch of our energy laughing?"
"Wow, you're a real treat tonight," my friend Maddy told me, she was the other half of the girl half of this corny date.
"I'm just so over these bullshit slapsticky wastes of film where people catch on fire and fall off roofs and is supposed to be funny." I retorted. The martini was only partially slicing through my thick mood.
"You're such a fucking snob," Maddy said, shaking her Sapphire and soda so the ice would melt. (Maddy loves it when the ice melts. She loves the condensation on the outside of the glass and she loves cutting people down with her wit.) "This is coming from you, who claims to 'only like foreign films.' Get over yourself. We're seeing Superbad and that's that."
"Fuck." I said, and finished my drink.
I was not being funny tonight.

Superbad is the newest of a series of sophmoric, ridiculous, but ultimately and underlyingly hilarious films that deal with the tribulations of being a teen and all of the alcohol and sex and/or lack of both of these things that have captivated young American movie-goers for over a decade (did this all start with American Pie? Was Stiffler's mom just the first in a long line of MILF's to follow? Was Band Camp the archetype for the hilariously uncool that we would then see again, and again, and again in these young, idiotic flicks of the nineties and two thousands?) Superbad is, true to form, SUPER BAD. It is all of the things I was anxious about: fat adolecents eating pizza bagels, under-age titties, Goldschlagger vodka, and so many fights, falls, fires, fucks and other moments for cringing...

I laughed the whole time.
Drunken high school sex? Perfect.
Black eye, missing tooth, torched cop car? Knee slappers.
Pizza bagels? Hilarious.
I was a girl with a sense of humor.

In 2005 the Stanford School of Medicine released a study which compared how men and women reacted to jokes. The study found, surprisingly, that women were more likely to laugh when a joke was told to them than a man. Why? Because they weren't expecting anything in the first place, so when something was funny it surprised them and they got a real laugh. (Much like the surprise a man gets when a woman is funny?) Women were found more likely to respond to narrative jokes and stories where men were slapping their knees to slapstick and whacking off to one-liners. When the women were laughing, parts of their brain (the left prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens) were active. Those of men were not. (Or perhaps men do not even have room in their heads for these parts of the brain.)

Whenever men voice what they are looking for in a mate, they say stupidly that they require their other half to have "a good sense of humor." Not a male sense of humor, mind you, for anything aggressive or grotesque would be a turn off. But a good sense of humor, yeah, thats important. A chic has to know how to laugh. How does this translate, when we women are reacting in a physically different way, flexing different parts of our brain, than men when we act funny or react to funny? And if men don't want an equal in terms of sense of humor, how will the relationship be equal in any of its arenas?

Are we neurologically fucked from the start? Will our boyfriends be pantsing each other and shotgunning beers forever while we women are whittling down our wit?

In comedy clubs, as a rule, only one woman is to appear on the bill each night. (Exceptions are limited to special nights dubbed things like "Ladies of Laughter" or "Men, Off the Mic!" or some such nonsense.) It has been suggested that this is because of the power that a stand-up comedian holds, their intimidation factor. It has also been suggested that the mostly-male audience cannot deal with this blow to their own egos, their insecurities, the blow of a woman telling them what is funny from a place that is physically higher than they are in their seats. Men might laugh at Ellen DeGeneres' hokey humor, but only because they know she would never go to bed with them.

Famous female comic Joan Rivers said: "Women want to be pretty or sexy. Funny isn't sexy. Comedy isn't sexy."
(Perhaps that had to do with her own insecurities or physical short-comings, but like every smart comedian, she has learned to turn these into material.)

As humans, we use humor in all kinds of ways. We make things funny to avoid recognizing their sadness, we make fun of others to avoid others making fun of us. We use humor as a mechanism to attract people, to avoid lonliness. We use it to feign confidence. We use it in purity and good fun, or to get somewhere or to get what we want. One might make a joke at a party: everyone standing in his circle will laugh. And no one can tell for sure if the joke was part of the teller or the teller part of the joke.

As women, we use humor for all of these reasons and for others. Like men, we use jokes as bait and as charm, but we also use them as secrets. Our jokes have been known to be heard under our breath, behind closed doors, over the telephone. Our jokes are made of all forms of satires and puns and plays on words and knowledge of pop culture. They have been known to blend with conversation so well that they go unnoticed, to come across as interesting rather than ironic, to have their point be missed. Old-timer women like Jane Austen and Francis Burney used humor as a cloak, covering their cutting contempt and disguising their feminist attacks on society. Sarah Silverman is a modern version of the same. And look at all those brunettes, disguising their envy of we fair-haired bimbos in the form of the blonde joke...

Women: seductresses of satire.
Men: seduced by slapstick.

Maybe men really do just have minds like martinis: dirty and transparent.
Maybe they really are like government bonds: they take too long to mature.
If these jokes hold true, the joke's on me. 'Cause I love me a man, funny or not.


After Superbad our foursome tumbled out of the theater, laughing forcefully and repeating lines from the movie.
"When they were in the mall trying on those pants! And they were talking about how tight the pants were! Sooo funny!"
"Yeah and that part at the party where the chic took him upstairs! She should get a fucking Oscar for that. Perfect drunk high school chic."
All the way back to the car, we laughed.
We hung on each other and walked in the middle of the midnight street.
Two boys and two girls, laughing at the same thing.

(Conclusion: pizza bagels are universally funny. Hilarious. Ironic, even, for those of us with a sense of humor.)