No Clever Title

So, ladies and gentlemen, the unspeakable has happened, and just what I was afraid of: my fucking shitty-ass Apple laptop has pretty much died. My second day here. When I get home, I'm gonna walk into their fucking Genius bar and beat somebody with it. So unless I can get it to start back up, I'm going to have to use the computer lab from now on. Which might not be such a bad thing. That will mean in my room I don't have a computer, a TV or a radio. I think the sensory deprivation will be good for me, frankly. But I'm still going to try to fix it.

Last night a bunch of students went to some crazy lounge called AVA. I couldn't find it on the internet. It sort of reminded me of Club de Ville, but it was mostly inside. Everything was red, including a tiny red dance floor, that was about 4 feet x 4 feet. Otherwise you couldn't really dance, and the music was too loud to talk, and no one really knows each other anyway. But "The Girls," as they will heretofore be affectionatally known as, got very excited last night about going to a gay club and seeing a drag show. So there you go. I guess we're gonna try to make that happen eventually.

It's true, I guess, that Monterrey is very Americanized. I wasn't sure what people meant by that, and I'm still not totally sure, except that there are Wal-Marts and HEB's, and the club we went to last night was in some upscale part of town that looked like any American city. It looked like the Arboretum, in fact. Our professor took us to Wal-Mart yesterday to buy some groceries and stuff, and it looked just like any American Wal-Mart as well, except actually cleaner than any American Wal-Mart I've ever seen. I really want to write about some of my first impressions of Mexico, and how I've been feeling, and what I've been observing, but I can't really think of much very meaningful or profound to say about it. Maybe Monterrey does feel too much like an American city for me to be struck by any kind of deep culture shock at this point. one thing that made an impression, was when we first crossed the border, and right next to the highway were these incredibly dismal shanty-towns, really, just shacks and shacks and dilapidated shacks everywhere. But stuck around in between these shacks in various places were billboards for very chic products like perfumes, with sprawling naked white women hawking the stuff. Among some of the worst poverty I've ever seen. I wasn't exactly sure who these advertisements were intended to reach, unless it was just the people on the highway, but how depressing.

My schedule here is going to be horribly easy. I'm going to have a Spanish class from 11-1 every day, and that's about it. Yesterday when I was in my professor's room helping him move furniture (don't ask), he said our class was only going to meet once a week, and then mostly just to talk, and that he wasn't really going to make us do anything. More than teach us history, he just wants us to go out and live in the culture and go to museums and learn things that way. He pretty much said everyone's going to get an A. So that's cool. There's this dude in my group who's been dying to go see X-Men, so I think we might do that tonight. Or whoever wants to. There's also another club outing tonight.

Last night my roommate had a nightmare, apparently, in the middle of the night, and shouted and jumped out of bed, and of course I woke up, and was totally freaked out, but once he realized it was a dream, he was fine. I also grew a cold sore on my lip yesterday, which totally pisses me off.