Where am I?

Still home sweet home, indeed.

Starting sometime between 7 and 8 p.m. every evening, I am ridiculously bored.

If it is raining, I can scurry around, moving guacales to catch the streams of water pouring from my roof into my house.

If my host family dogs have decided to spend the night on my side of town on my patio, I can spend a few minutes talking to them and throwing meaningless threats at them. We all know I won't hit them, so they don't even stir.

If my computer wasn't broken, I could use that to watch a movie, listen to podcasts or edit photos. But it's screwed up, too.

The books I have in my house are cien por ciento bad. Books in english here can be expensive, so I've been trying to rotate through various selections from the Peace Corps office. They all suck. I just finished a terrible "travel tale" because I had nothing else to do. Hey, buddy, just because you decided to leave your super senior year at university, 7 credits short of graduation and move to mexico to do blow and screw tourists, doesn't mean you're qualified to write a book.

But I digress.

I finally broke out the Polymer clay my mom sent me some months back.
I made a super badass ring. I put it in the oven, and it bubbled, melted and smoked.

Damn.

I re-made it.

Same thing.

So I called my mom. She made a few suggestions, but footnoted her ideas with "make sure to clean out the toaster oven and air your house out really well, that plastic is not good to be breathing in."

I told her I would. But I kind of laughed in my head.

I kept it to myself that just earlier that day I was standing in my yard, putting matches to a plastic bag of toilet paper, a churritos bag and various other pieces of debris that people threw into my yard.

I also didn't mention that my fire was a tenth of the size of the fires of my neighbors, and that they don't make it a point to pack all the plastic and paper garbage they can into the Sonsonate bus terminal garbage bins, like I do.

Nor did I mention that damn near every cooking fire in this country is started with a little wood and a whole lot of plastic or styrofoam.

Breathe it in. Deep.

There is no point in mentioning any of that. Because my mom is still right. The toxic residue from the clay probably should be scrubbed out, and my windows should have been open. I think it is just easy to lose sight of what makes sense when you live in a way that forces you to do and accept things that are absolutely lunatic. - burning trash, pouring bleach and detergent into rivers, not refrigerating your eggs, and drinking cafe listo, to name a few.

I finally got a ring to come out right. And a few hairpins, too. I shook my fists at the dogs, locked my gate and went to bed, listening to the rain hitting the bottom of a guacal, and wanting to tear apart whatever lame book I am subjecting myself to until I can fall asleep at last.