Cancun Dispatch: 8/29

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MEXICO CITY, MEXICO -- Well, I'd hoped to get to bed early, because I had to get up at 5 a.m. to catch a plane back to Mexico City, but I discovered I had committed the ultimate activist sin of omission -- I'd brought my cell phone, which was finally fixed to work in Mexico, but left the charger back in San Francisco.

So I spent a frantic hour emptying all the stuff out of my bags and repacking two or three times until I finally admitted to myself that it just wasn't there. I went to sleep more stressed out than I like to get around little things like that. In fact, I've learned from doing these actions that I can't afford to get stressed out about things like that -- the general level of stress is too high already, and I don't have energy to spare for worrying about something that really I just need to deal with.

As Lisa is driving me to the airport, we are both admitting that we are pushed beyond even our considerably elastic edges and desperately need some rest. I'm hoping for a quiet evening and early bed time tonight. Whether it's Mars or menopause or lack of sleep, I don't want to keep being this irritable and snappish -- it will ultimately make me less effective.

I take a taxi from the airport because I am bringing cash to the punks for their bus tickets and I don't want to risk the metro, which is notorious for pickpockets and theft. When Lisa and I were here before, we got caught in a crush and she ended up with her backpack open and a hand in her pocket that was not her own. Luckily, we were alert and had packed right, so we didn't lose anything. I'm going to the meeting of the Mexican Space, a coordinating coalition of Mexican groups, which is being held in a union hall in a working class neighborhood of Mexico City. The driver is a sweet man who has no gender hangups about asking directions, and we ask and ask and ask: shopkeepers, old men with bad teeth, women making tortillas, policemen, other taxi drivers. No one seems to know even where the colonia, the neighborhood, in question is. But the driver is unfazed. "No te preoccupa," he smiles. "Quedar calma. Vamos a encontrarlo."

I am calm -- I have, in fact, surrendered to a near stuperous condition, when we turn a corner and a car pulls up and asks us for directions to the same street. I recognize Carmen, one of the students who is going to the same meeting. I move my bags into their car; her friend and the driver consult a map, and I pay him, thanking him and tipping generously -- both because he's been so nice and because my partner is a taxi driver, and I know that a taxi driver's lot is not a happy one anywhere in the world.

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