Back from Mexico

So Cancun is a really big, thrashed, overdeveloped city with all sorts of overdeveloped areas around it. Very cheesy. And the Isla is getting pretty darned developed and we were in the developedest hotel there. But it was really really nice and I didn't even care that I was the biggest gringa around.

The Carribean sea is so beautiful, I can't blame people for wanting to visit. And the fish are neat. I went snorkeling with Ed and Doug at El Garrafon — the cheap place, not the $50 a day place — and the fish were pretty spectacular. They're kind of used to people bringing little jugs of fish food out and using them to attract them, so they will swim up to you. And then Ed threw fish food at me and the fish were all over me. Ew. So. Gross. Big ole floppy yellow and black stripy fish with their fish mouths going glop glop glop at me and their unblinking eyes.

Here are a sample of the photos I took:



Doug is so relaxed. He got pretty badly burned, though. People, use your SPF 50s on the first day!



Ha ha. It was so funny that first day. The boat was called "Turista!" Like the illness! We were so naive.



Rob is so darn cool. He and Carol Jean made it all happen.



You can't climb the Mayan ruins anymore. Some people think this is a real loss. They are jerks who don't mind fat American asses trotting up and down the limestone, wearing it out and scratching their names into the walls because they can and they'd like to think they're as significant as some extinct culture. That is a symptom of the American Cultural Virus that, coincidentally, could be found on the bus back from Chichen Itza. It was showing a Wesley Snipes vehicle, "Unstoppable."

I made everyone get up at 5 a.m. to get to CI, by the way. I am a damn martinet when I'm put in charge. And the bus didn't leave from Cancun until 9. It's like that episode of the Dog Whisperer when the Great Dane who is naturally a follower is put in charge by his stupid owners. I'm naturally a follower. I can't help it.



Pasty person at Tulum! Watch out!

One of the things that surprised and gratified me on this trip were all the incredibly fit, young, attractive people who had all tanned to a deep brown and had their hair sunstreaked so they were the same color all over. They were Japanese, Brazilian, European (North and South), Israeli, and possibly Visigoth. And then there I was. Pasty and not terribly petite. I felt like the Wilmoth clan was the mid-way marker between these demi-gods of attractiveness and the fat old American people in loud clothes. Unfortunately, as the poem says, "things fall apart, the center cannot hold." Someday I will be a fat old American woman with her shorts all bunched up in her blazingly white, fat thighs. Wearing white Keds with scrunched down pink socks.

No, I feel a duty to try to maintain the center for as long as possible.

More photos next month, when I get my bandwidth back!

Is Cancun cheesy? Is it fun?

That is a question I will be exploring over the next week. So come back and do find out if Cancun is cheesy, fun, etc. and if the addition of my family there contributes to either quality.

On a side not, it's gray, dark and frigid here. It's the perfect time to get the heck out of Dodge. Well, I'm sure January might be better, actually, as it's sort of one of the really low points on the winter dark and wet spiral.

More book review stuff

Read "Night Watch" by Sarah Waters. There is a reason it was the favorite for the Booker Prize. And as to Meegan's concern that it would be too pat, too easily wrapped up? No, it isn't. The novel goes backwards in time, so you see the whole cast of miserable people finish miserable and start fairly miserable, too. Waters' power of description is incredible. There's a part where an ambulance driver in WWII-era London is driving through a bombed-out street and Waters compares the drift of debris to bubbles settling in stout, and there are other wonderful little pieces like that in her book.

I'm picking up the Booker winner, "The Inheritance of Loss" by Anita Desai's kid, today at the library, so I guess I'll get to see why it won now.

Also flipped through Simon Winchester's "Karakatoa" and thought it was a little too formulaic for my tastes. Plus I already get plate techtonics and don't think it's too mindblowing and in need of popular science description for the target audience of the book (i.e. wannabe nerds like me).

Another book I read, and this will be one you can't necessarily get a hold of, is "On the Harbor," a local history book by my publisher and this guy I used to know. And I have to say, the first time I heard "local history book" I figured it would be one of those squat, aspen-green covered things with a whole bunch of text squished together and narratives that were all intertwined with dreadful boring dates, because local history doesn't always have the best enthusiasts. But no. It's a really lovely book with photos, sidebars, graphics and all the other good stuff about newspapers. And honestly, I should have known better when I was thinking it because both John C. Hughes and Ryan Teague Beckwith have impeccable journalism taste and Ryan in particular was always interested in coming up with new ways to present information. And my God, Grays Harbor has a lurid, fascinating history, and the journalism instincts to find the "telling detail," and to present information bravely, trusting the reader, really make the stories accessible.

So the one story I read about three or four times last night was "Who Killed Laura Law?" It's a murder mystery from 1939 that has never been solved and probably never will be. It was a flash point between "Red" (serious instigator types) and "White" (more conservative) Communist factions in town and between the Commies and the local business tycoons. And it's probably because there was so much tension and suspicion and bad actors that the murder of this young mother wasn't solved.

So, the two books I haven't been able to put down lately are "Night Watch" and "On the Harbor." Make of that what you will.

Book Review part Duh

Okay, "Carry Me Down" wasn't that great. Plus everytime I picked it up I thought of that song that goes, "Tie me kangaroo down, boys, tie me kangaroo down." And that was possibly more than you wanted or needed to know about the workings of my mind.

Next up: "Night Watch" by Sarah Waters, who previously introduced the lesbian Victorian circus novel to the stage with "Tipping the Velvet," which was a BBC production featuring the chick from "MI-5." I read the book and that was enough Victoriana for me. I expect "Night Watch," which appears to be nothing like the AWESOME-O Russian movie "Night Watch," to be about the same as "TtV" but WWII-ish. Which is to say, kind of awesome in crazy detail but not Russian "Night Watch" awesome, where people's heads blow up and there is an ensuing showdown between the forces of good and evil to be continued in "Day Watch."

So here's one of the beautiful views I am occasionally exposed to.



That's the beach at Westport. It won't look like this for long. Development will not be stopped. Money seeks its own level and development capitalizes on any authentic energy until it sucks it up, converting it to money. Perhaps it's an authentic neighborhood, or nature or something historic that gives an area its energy. That energy is so quickly converted to cash it'd make your head spin.

Dad went to the David Letterman show in NYC while he was at his pitchfest '06, No Print outlet Left Behind campaign and was really impressed with Xhibit (though he remembered his name as "Ingredient?") who appeared to be a humble rapper, giving props to his fans. My dad is so weird, people. A 60-y-o white man who loves to listen to rap and, last I checked, Imus. Basically anything shocking. Which explains why he thought the song had a positive message and not an ego-aggrandizing one, I guess.

Book Review time!

I finished a book! Two books! I'm feeling pretty good about that, so here's my personal, non-binding opinion of two Booker Prize nominees.

"Mothers Milk" Edward St. Aubyn. The names don't get Britisher than St. Aubyn (pron. "Sin Awbin"), and this book is pretty darn British, too. So although it contains a slimy psychiatrist elite academic sees-himself-as-a-third-person emotionally distanced father, it has its upside. Namely, the precocious older son of his who narrates the first quarter of the book. The beginning is a grim but hilarious piece of reminisence on birth, and it would be really too much to ask the rest of the book to be as good. And it can't be, but it's really darn good, even though it's a bit misogynistic with bad mother characters. This book still rocks, though.

"The Secret River." Kate Grenville. In the secret garden, the little lonely girl found a run down former monument to beauty and, uh, stuff (it's been a while). In the secret river, a transported Englishman finds a pack of aboriginals he can't understand, a bunch of jerks who are exploiting each other and has a wife who can't stop talking about going back to England, where their life was painted as even bleaker than in Australia. The book would have been better if people hadn't been quoted like this but rather in the usual way. I'm not sure what contemporary writers think they're doing with their free use of italics and punctuation.

I'm starting "Carry Me Down" (author? can't remember) and it's so far about a boy who knows when people are lying. Well, if "Blink" wasn't enough, here's the fictional version. And that's good enough for me. Because Malcom Gladwell may be full of himself (and he is!) but I still like just about everything he writes.

In other news, these guides are pretty good when it comes to helping me know something about going to the Cancun area: Moon handbooks, Rough Guide and Hidden Yucatan.

In incredibly shallow news: did anyone else notice how the Others have a really stringent planning code for their creepy suburb? There must be all sorts of homeowner association covenants governing the color and size of homes they can build. And boy are they hateful to outsiders. It's like Maumelle, Arkansas all over again. Because I definitely got the feeling some of the people in Maumelle would have loved to put a bunch of people that they considered outsiders into former dolphin holding tanks.