Symptomatic 2

After striking out on the live social scene, I returned to spending a couple of hours each night at my laptop, writing a little, chatting with people I had never sat next to, and checking out the news in English on Latin American countries, but especially Mexico because it was fresh in my mind. I learned the country was suffering a number of difficulties resulting from battles among drug families, and about a disused justice system presented in the dramatic documentary Presunto Culpable, but most of the news I could find concentrated on mishaps in the north of the nation. Very few newsworthy events outside of the education arena appeared to be happening in the south. Any discussion of the situation in 1994 had a historical flavor to it, as if the most recent revolutionary fervor had now joined its brethren on the shelf and in the books. Upon switching to travel guides and noting there was still a call out to come and enjoy “the best the country had to offer,” I started communicating with the woman in Texas, discussing the possibility of being in her area and seeing if we could meet and size each other up. She must have concluded I had formed Plan B because I could tell by the way she said it “might be nice” without conviction in the tone of her words that she was being duplicitous as I was and both of us were too shy to admit our possibilities had expired.