Liz, our faithful hiking guide, is in Peru for a few weeks, so I’m finding other activities to fill my weekend until she returns mid August while trying to get some mileage in.
We are two weeks into the Wellbutrin and I gotta say, I think it’s helping, though full dosage has come with a whopping dose of insomia. From what I’ve read this is usually a temporary side effect as the body adjusts. It feels like I’m able to have lows with catastrophizing them which is amazing. It’s been interesting watching myself have the emotional responses of a teenager, it’s almost like I’ve been removed from my body and am a passive and helpless observer as I have a complete meltdown over sometihng minor with this inability to move forward. And I watch myself and I tell myself, this is ok, there are avenues, this is not a big deal, but I just couldn’t make it hit home sufficiently to stop. This helps.
This is the last week of my first class at Harvard Extension School which means a scramble to clean up a rough 20 pages of writing. So I did myself a much needed favor and have taken last Friday through next Wednesday off work. The quarter has been interesting. I don’t know that I realized that school is a skill and one I haven’t practiced in quite some time at that. My ability to cram and just bust work out has definitely diminished. And I can’t quite tell if it’s a function of how much of the reading is now online, though I suspect that plays a role, but engaging with dry reading is definitely more challenging than it used to be. I’m hoping that as my classes get closer to my interests and as I get more practice in this will resolve itself. I’m already signed up for my fall class which seems infinitely more interesting- Global Development: Theory & Practice. No syllabus yet.
My therapist said something that kinda stuck with me and I’m rolling it around in my head and experimenting. And that is that I’m hard on myself. And it wasn’t that I didn’t know it, I think I thought that’s how everyone is and yes, this platonic ideal of constantly being kind to yourself is great n all, but come on, who does that? And then she said, you’ve been doing it so long that you don’t even see it. And that hit home in a different way. And I contemplated what would it be like to consider everything I do from a stance of doing the best I can given my present circumstances, which is in fact how I view virtually every one else’s life. Not having “well I did my best” be a consolation for something I think I didn’t do well, but having it genuinely be the only goal without regard to outcome. I’ve always measured by what could I accomplish in a vacuum of perfect circumstances, an idea that is pretty evidently ridiculous when voiced. So now I’m practicing.
Thursday night Sherry, Fran & I went to Propio a nice restaurant near my place. Now, I should say nice here means the prices of mid range in Portland, but the experience of higher end. Food quality a little, since honestly, I think most mid range in Portland are really freakin’ good. It was a really fun dinner. The space is this very cool indoor/outdoor very modern feel. I had fantastic drink with tequila, basil soda water, strawberry shrub and I feel like something else that I’m forgetting, but it was very tasty and refreshing. And then, because Sherry and Fran are excellent dinner companions, we just ordered a whole bunch of stuff and split it all.
Saturday I walked through Chapultepec Park to Museo Tamayo. It’s mushroom season here in Mexico and the entrance to Chapultepec reflects this. During which I actually discovered the long sought after entrance to the botanical garden (hint: you enter from the outside of the park).
Rufino Tamayo (1889-1991) was a contemporary of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquieros and Jose Clemente Orozco, but differed from them politically, believing the Revolution would cause more harm than good and shying away from overtly political themes in his work. While the three muralists identified with social cause and looked to raise the indigineous people of Mexico, Tamayo enjoyed the mestizo heritage of Mexico. He was born Oaxaca, of Zapotec heritage, and in his art he sought to capture the intersection of modernity and traditional Mexican values. His work is often intimate, looking at the individual human condition. He founded the museuem, with his wife, in 1981 as a public space that would promote the international art of his time.
There is pretty much none of his work in this museum.
It’s a low slung concrete building in Parque Tamayo, near the Anthropological Museum undergoing some construction. The first exhibit was entirely work by Tina Girouard (1946-2020), an American artist that I was completely unfamiliar with. She was the first female artist to be featured at Museo Tamayo in 1983. Her work evolved hugely during her lifetime. Born in Louisiana, she moved to New York in her mid 20s and was part of a post-minimalist scene, a vague sort of collection of visual artists and musicians who frequently used every day objects in their art and often seeking to imbue a sense of the human into the work. She was a founding member of FOOD, which if you haven’t read about, is kinda fascinating. Her work included performance art, creating spaces from household items, and video. Tina Girourd created a system of hundreds of symbols representing different things such as house, death, conflicting evidence, and Tina, frequently printed on fabrics and sewn together, as shown below, in an effort to create a universal language.
She moved back to Lousiana after about a decade in New York and continued her work, focused on fabrics embedding her language. She later moved to Haiti and partnered with Haitian artist Antoine Oleyant to create a series of images made entirely of sequins. These are good sized images, most measuring at least 3×3, with an unbelievable number of sequins involved. All bright and shiny.
I can’t say I exactly enjoyed her work and some of the fabric pieces were just strings of fabric that had perhaps been used in performance pieces, but didn’t carry whatever vitality they may have invoked into a stationary exhibit. But I did admire her sense of purpose and intention in creating art with whatever and wherever she was, seeing it as a constant community experience, and deeply human.
The second exhibit, titled Archaic Futures, featured sparse paintings and sculpture. There was a sense of modernity, minimalism, and a bit of melancholy, leading one to think of a distopian archaic future not terribly far from Mad Max. But they were powerful pieces.
I left the museum a bit after 4 with threatening grey skies overhead and most definitely in potential downpour time zone. So sadly, I saved the botanical garden for another day and hustled on back to my neighborhood, waiting at any moment to get drenched, retreat to the crowded safety of an awning and call an Uber. However, I lucked out and made it both to collect Leo and all the way home. A few drops of rain fell while I was fumbling for my keys.
Sunday was Mercado Jamaica day. This is the flower market. I had not been before and was super excited for flowers! Sherry and I walked the roughly 3 miles from my place through a neighborhood called Doctores. Now, if you google it, you’ll probably get told not to go to this neighborhood and really there’s not a lot there. But it borders some very popular and fully gentrified neighborhoods, which means it’s slowly gentrifying. We walked through a fabulous looking tianguis market with a big variety of really good looking fruit and veg that was not terribly far from my house and continued on through the neighborhood which definitely fluctuated from more run down buildings to really charming ones with parks across the way.
It was really lovely to walk with Sherry, we haven’t hung out on our own and it felt good and really organic to have that time with her. She’s starting a really cool Mexican art history class online that if my Spanish was better I would totally be into, but it’s a year long program going through all the eras and iterations of Mexican art. She also volunteered herself as a museum or art outing buddy- that said, I know the woman is insanely busy, so we’ll see whether that pans out.
Fran’s partner, Gus, had recommended El Huarache Azteca which is about a block away from the mercado, so we met up with Fran at the restaurant. Huaraches are vaguely football shaped masa (or the sandal for which it’s named if you prefer), usually stuffed with beans and then with stuff on top. Stuff can be a giant slab of meat, chorizo, or in my case crema y queso con aguacate. They were enormous and we were stuffed.
Then we wandered into the mercado. There is a smallish food section, focused on produce where I picked up some beautiful looking hoja santa and some copal incense. Huge pinatas hung over head, some were turkeys, some were cans of beers and some were giant stars with streamers. Sherry’s birthday is next Monday and I think we are all now committed to having a pinata on my patio, there was talk of filling it with glitter and rose petals…. And then the flowers. Rows of flowers. Then rows of massive bouquets, like no longer bouquets, but now fixtures. A sign hanging over mounds roses reading 6 dozen for $100 pesos (aka a little over $5). Rose petals in bags, and not small bags, we’re talking at least a bucket of rose petals. Roses come cheap in Mexico. Most of the flowers were the standard ones seen in Mexico, nothing too exotic, but there are a few vendors who have heliconica, hedychium, and tropical gingers. Little posies of gardenias were going for 20 pesos, I bought two. Big branches of dried blooming grasses were 70. It was lovely. Although the ranunculus was inexplicably expensive, but I’d never seen the butterfly ranunculus before, it looks like a cross between a rose and a poppy with less tightly bound petals.
This is like the Costco of flower markets. A huge warehouse style space featuring over 1,000 vendors, about half selling loose flowers and another 25% selling arrangements, the remainder sell produce, tacos or other food, and live plants.
We ambled through rows of flowers oohing and aahing. Not shockingly, it turns out I have more familiarity with various flowers and plants that either of the other women, so I got to encourage to stop and smell the stalks of nardo (tuberose) The back row held live plants, giant fiddlehead ferns for $30 USD, kumquats, 6 ft tall parlor palms, rows of tiny and not so tiny succulents. There was also a whole stand of fruit plants, ranging from figs to raspberries and apples to papayas.
There were a few stands with dried flowers and they’re packed in tiny spaces. The floor area of a couple was maybe 5×7, generously, but dried flowers and grasses, some natural, some dyed, were easily stacked 10 ft high. Strings of amaranth dyed sharply white or intensely pink hung down. Some stands had massive arrangements of dried flowers, maybe 4×4, hanging from above.
Early afternoon, I returned to my apartment and had a very mellow evening with Leo. I made an Ottolenghi spiced eggplant recipe that actually turned out pretty darn close to its US equivalent, so that was super exciting. And now I prepare for the week ahead which should involve frantic writing, although I’m also hoping to get in some good gym cardio sessions, all while practicing a more accepting, validating, and probably rewards based attitude towards myself. Fingers crossed.
Year One Project 
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