The rain falls horizontally

You’d have thought that we wouldn’t have worried about getting wet.

We were going camping at a waterfall, after all.

But the ominous-looking storm clouds starting rolling in just as our destination – Nochixtlán, a small city in the valley – came into view. As we slowly cut down the mountain, following the switchbacks along the two-lane highway, the big desert sky above “Noch” became increasingly ink-colored.

I, the only American and, perhaps accordingly, the only sarcastic one in the group, muttered something in defeated-sounding Spanish about the lovely contrast between the black thunderheads and sunset-stained sky. About how ironic it was that we’d left sunshine and friendly cotton-white clouds behind at home in Huajuapan just 90 minutes earlier. About how, had we left when we said we were going to leave – before we’d sat for an hour and fifteen minutes with Octavio* and his mother in their kitchen, politely nibbling sour green plums and making small talk about all the exotic-to-me, impossibly-named regional fruits (have you ever eaten cuajenicuili?) I’d tried during my 10-month tenure in town, waiting for him to finish his dinner – we might have missed this storm altogether.

My Mexican car mates were stoic as the rain hit: At least we were still dry.

As the wipers struggled to keep up with the sheets of rain striking us head on, I thought of a university colleague’s warning a few days earlier: Umbrellas are of no use. In Oaxaca, the rain falls horizontally.

Whose idea was this anyway, attempting a camping trip in the rainy season?

But I had celebrated a birthday a few days earlier and had been, true to my Taureaness, stubborn. Stubborn in my determination to mark the occasion with an outdoor weekend retreat. I’d elected the waterfall at Apoala, a green gem that’s tucked away in the thirsty terrain that is Oaxaca’s Mixteca Baja. Thirsty, that is, for the ten months of the year when this corner of the world doesn’t see a drop of rain. Nature, it seems, makes up for lost time in May and June.

It was because of the season that friends had been hesitant to commit to the trip. But that Oaxacan Saturday had been blessed with blue skies, and we’d loaded the car with the requisite tent and sleeping bags and a few granola bars, just in case.

The rain let up just as we reached the industrial outskirts of Noch, allowing me to snap several pictures of soggy Corona billboards framed by fragile rainbows. We navigated the grey city’s flooded streets, rolling down the windows to ask locals, attacking the newly-formed pools on storefront sidewalks with tired brooms, for directions to the road to Apoala.

They’d motion vaguely with their broom handles: Por allá. It’s over there.

The rain caught us again just as we transitioned from pavement to mud, easing into the 28-kilometer-long dirt road that would take us to Apoala. Twilight became nearly midnight as we crept past washed-out banks and through flooded potholes, assured every few kilometers by an “Apoala this way” arrow carefully painted on a board nailed to a tree. Sarcastic “are you sure?” remarks from the gringa riding shotgun were met with silence from the three Mexicans.

At least we were still dry.

After three hours, hunger set in, and we raided the stash of granola bars. It was too late to turn back.

Ten kilometers outside of Apoala, the horizontal sheets of precipitation sputtered into a drizzle. Rounding a bend in the road, we caught a glimpse of the bare yellow lightbulbs adorning the homes of Apoala’s 200-something-odd residents. Their confident glow was reassuring as coasted down the mountain: It wasn’t raining in the valley.

We were still dry.

We arrived, our hunger and weariness compounded by the stress of rainstorms on dark country roads, more than four hours after we’d left Octavio’s mother back in Huajuapan. Despite the fact that we’d spent the entire evening under water, as it were, we’d arrived too late to make the hike down to the waterfall to set up camp. Even I, still the only American and still, perhaps accordingly, the only sarcastic one in the group, was too exhausted to make a crack at the irony.

We settled for a campsite in a meadow and began to unload the car. That’s when I stepped -- submerging my sneaker, sock and left sweatpant -- into one of the irrigation ditches that criss-crossed the unlit field. The sound -- the gasp that accompanies a confident stride interrupted by an unforeseen obstacle, the deep plunk of a leg sinking calf-deep into frigid mountain water, the sharp hiss of an English-language obscenity -- was enough to pull my Mexican friends out of their hunger-induced stoicism and into fits of belly laughter.

And I’d been the one carrying the flashlight. The irony was too much. The sarcastic remarks began.

At least they were still dry.

*Names have been changed to protect the chronically late.

All Dogs Go To Heaven

If the title of this entry made you groan because it's so darn cheesy, you might want to skip the next couple of paragraphs. But it's just that there's so many clichés that would be perfect titles for this entry on the lives of Man's Best Friend here in Mexico. Indulge me.

Like "It's a Dog-Eat-Dog World." Compared to the pampered lives of pups up north, the daily grind ain't easy for perros here South of the Border. People here in Mexico sometimes don't have enough to eat, so tight family budgets don't tend to get stretched to buy fiber-and-flaxseed-enriched super-duper premium heart-shaped gourmet dog food. Pet owners don't drop money to buy their dogs rhinestone-studded collars or Louis Vuitton-patterned carrying cases. There's no doggie daycares or bow-wow bakeries. Nope. Mexican dogs sleep outside and usually subsist on stale tortillas. Or trash in the street.

Or "It's a Dog's Life." Despite the fact that they're homeless and hungry and stuck outside during rainy season so their fur is always matted and dirty, Mexican dogs are darn happy. They trot around with their little doggie friends, tails wagging, sniffing each other's you-know-whats and having a grand old time. To them, it's the good life when they're not being abused or hit by cars. They're pretty easy to please.

There's the "This Place is Going to the Dogs" cliché. Given the tough circumstances, all logic dictates that Mexican dogs shouldn't survive and populate. But there somehow manage to be hundreds of them in your average small town. They outnumber the human population in some areas, running around the streets in motley little packs, chasing each other and shiny cars and -- ahem -- iPod-clad gringas jogging in the street. At any given moment, I'm surrounded by dogs. There's at least two or three that hang out in my apartment complex. There's the gang of 'em that keeps turf near the grocery store. There's dogs in parking lots. There's dogs on beaches.

I've been in Mexico for so long that I've somehow stopped noticing the fact that dogs are everywhere. I sent my family some pictures of my recent beach trip. Instead of commenting on the deep blue Pacific and the pretty orange sunsets, their feedback was, "What's up with all the dogs?" I looked back at the pictures, noticing that there was a different pooch in almost every shot. The tan one that belongs to a friend. The white one that was his (the tan one's) weekend "fling." The big black one that followed me around for three days after I fed her cold oatmeal one morning. The little black one that hung around our campsite. The crazy-looking mixed one that went swimming with us in the river. Pinches perros.

Dogs are part of the landscape here, like cacti and Corona billboards and ancient Vokswagen Bugs. Hell, there are even dogs in churches. True story, people. Check my pictures.

Where's Bob Barker when you need him?

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses...

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. And it’s not because I’ve been laid up in a hospital somewhere with the swine flu, contrary to what the media might have you believe. Nope, I’m actually quite healthy and H1N1-free, thankyouverymuch.

My excuse for the nearly-three-week hiatus since my last post does have to do with the flu, though. Or rather, the fabulous -- albeit surprise -- 10-day vacation we teachers got after the Mexican government closed all schools in response to the virus. My excuse has to do with the camping trip that I took down to the Oaxacan coast during those “flu” days. (I simply HAD to get out of Huajuapan. The panic in the eyes of the face mask-clad locals in the street, coupled with the oh-my-God-this-is-unbelievable-we’re-all-gonna-die news reports would be enough to bring anyone to hysterics.)

But really, I’m going to blame the delayed post on the topes. Yup, that's my excuse. Topes.

Avid GringaCulichi readers will realize that this is not the first time that topes (speed bumps, a.k.a reductores, as pictured above) have been the bane of my existence. Nor will it be the last. But I digress…

There is about 500 kilometers (300 miles) highway between Huajuapan and the Pacific coast. Back where I come from, the drive should take about 4.5 hours, assuming you’re cruising the highway at a not-likely-to-get-you-pulled-over speed of 70 mph.

But here in Oaxaca, that 300 miles of highway (that's winding, mountainous highway, mind you) is riddled with topes. And when you’re riding in a car weighed down with two Mexicans, two gringas, a small dog, two tents, lawn chairs, an umbrella, a cooler, a grill, charcoal, enough food for four days, enough booze for four weeks, and assorted trashy paperback novels for beach reading, those topes are darn hard to drive over. The bottom of your car hits the cement and makes an awful scraping sound.

So, all passengers (including the dog, sometimes) had to get out of the car and walk at every tope -- every single PINCHE tope -- while the driver creeped across. I lost count of the number of topes we crossed somewhere after about 114. So, what should’ve been a 5-hour journey, tops, actually took us about 12. Boo.

But we didn’t mind. We were on a surprise vacation, man! We were on a road trip, man! And despite government-issued public service announcements to avoid all contact with the outside word for fear of the deadly flu virus, we were going to the beach, man!

(Out of respect for the international health emergency, we did, however, choose as our destination Las Lagunas de Chacahua, a semi-virgin bit of paradise where a fresh-water lagoon meets the salt-water Pacific. The way we justified it, no people = no germs = no flu virus.)

After 10 hours in the car, we pulled off the tope-ridden highway onto a palm tree-lined dirt road that would take us to the beach (see above). The air was salty. The sky was cloud-free. We were almost there!

But the road was rough. Our average cruising speed was about 15 kmph. (No lies. Check the picture, folks.) That last bit of road – the only thing standing between us and reading trashy paperbacks on the Pacific coast – took an agonizing two hours.

But we got there. We drank our four weeks’ worth of booze in four days. We read trashy paperback novels. We soaked up the sun. And we didn’t hear anything about the damn pig flu, save for a static-filled nightly news report brought to us courtesy of the aluminum-foil-clad antenna of our Chacahuaqueña host’s television. (We were camping under a palapa just outside of her kitchen.)

Despite the fact that we ate all the food and drank all the booze and that I mysteriously managed to lose not only my swimsuit but also one of the trashy paperbacks – despite the fact that our car should have been much lighter on the return trip – it still took us 10 hours to get back to Huajuapan.

So that’s my excuse for the delayed post, folks. I’ve been recovering from tope trouble. I haven’t had time to write. So, please accept my apologies from swine flu-ridden Mexico. As you can see from the envy-inducing sunset and beer-enjoying pictures (Indio should pay us royalties for the latter) above, we’re suffering a lot down here. Special thanks goes to everyone who panicked and cancelled their beach trips and freed up the sand and surf for us in Chacahua!

When it rains...

...it pours.

I'm going to draw an analogy between Morton Salt's good ol' tagline and the steady stream of just-when-you-think-it-couldn't-get-any-worse-oh-look-it-just-got-worse headlines coming out of my lovely host country. I think it is an especially fitting analogy as we enter rainy season here in Mexico.

Where to begin...

In case you've missed the headlines for the past, um, year, Mexico's in the throes of a somewhat major drug war. The army patrols streets in border towns. Journalists are murdered. Cartel members shoot at each other in supermarkets and shopping malls. Folks get kidnapped. I can tell you from first-hand experience that in some cities it's impossible to go out for dinner without getting a gun pointed in your direction. It's kind of ugly up near the frontera.

There's also the issue of this pesky recession. Yup, la crisis has officially arrived here in Mexico. The peso is steadily sinking. Prices are steadily rising. A peso here, a peso there. That's a lot of pesos when you're only making 100 of them a day, like many folks do here in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. In my case, an hour of peso-salaried work here in Mexico currently converts to approximately enough dollars to buy a one-way bus fare in Chicago. Nice.

You might have also heard about this swine flu. Death tolls change hourly, depending on who you're asking or what you're reading, but Oaxaca has the dubious honor of being home to the first documented swine-related death. Mexico City shut down last week. And as of noon today, Huajuapan de León has followed suit. My classes have officially been cancelled through May 6. Students have already vacated campus in search of face masks and vitamin C supplements. From tomorrow, I'll be on a vacation of sorts, a kind of vacation where you're not supposed to leave your house or breathe or talk or hug or kiss anyone.

And, just today...more good news. A 6.0 earthquake near Mexico City. We felt it here in Oaxaca. You know, just in case things weren't interesting enough.

If you relied on headlines alone, you'd think that the situation was pretty darn depressing down here. Pistols, pesos, pigs, and...darnit, I can't think of an earthquake-related word that begins with "p."

But, truth is, things ain't so bad.

Or at least things aren't as bad as the US media is making them out to be. Not everyone who visits Mexico gets kidnapped by a drug cartel -- or the swine flu from riding the Mexico City metro. I promise.

But, in my humble opinion, the glue that's holding this country together is the people. Mexicans, if nothing else, are survivors. They're resilient. The past couple of hundred years of Mexican history have seen a disproportionate number of awful events: wars, foreign invasions, natural disasters, financial crashes and political scandals. Folks here are used to these things. The mentality is that if today sucks, mañana will be better.

Life goes on here in Mexico. Cartel violence, economic woes, world health emergencies and natural disasters will not affect Mexico's core, the things that make Mexico an amazing place to live, the things that keep me here this country, even through its rough patch. Crisis will not stop people from greeting strangers in the street with a heartfelt "buenas tardes" (even if it is muffled by a sanitary mask). Crisis will not stop people from making time for friends and family (even if the government has discouraged handshakes and kisses). Crisis will not stop people from having a laugh over a beer (even if the bars are closed).

Crisis will not stop people from smiling.

This afternoon, I happened to be up near the front gate of our university as scores of blue face mask-clad students filed off campus. Some looked a bit worried, some were laughing with friends (no classes for a week and a half is a pretty sweet deal to any 19-year-old, even if a world health crisis is the reason behind it). But I caught a glimpse of one student, walking alone.

He'd drawn a big, goofy smile on his mask, just where his mouth would've been below.

It will get better mañana. I promise.

:-)

NOTE: This entry is also posted on a fantastic site called The Truth About Mexico. The site offers "real" perspectives from expat-type people living in Mexico, countering a bit of the sensationalism we're all seeing in the mainstream media. Give it a read, leave your feedback, and please spread the word!!

Ants in My Pants

As the rainy season approaches here in Oaxaca, I've been comparing my apartment (pictured above -- isn't the garden pretty?) to Noah's Arc.

There are lots of, um, species, aboard.

They come inside to escape the torrential rains outside.

And they travel in pairs.

But let me make some clarifications. The aforementioned species aren't the of the cute, cuddly, illustrated Bible variety -- they're mostly larger-than-life cockroaches, nightmare-inducing spiders and large quantities of ants. And they're not just in my apartment to escape the rain. They've been kicking it there for the past 10 months -- for as long as I've been there (I've blogged on their presence before. Their numbers seem to be increasing with the rain factor). And while the cockroaches and spiders seem to travel in pairs, the ants -- oh, those damn ants -- like to hang out in the hundreds.

Hundreds. No lie. But I'll get to that in a minute.

That pretty little garden in front of my apartment (again, see the picture) is a breeding ground for all things creepy crawly. The problem is that the insects don't actually stay there --they make their way into my apartment via the doors and windows on the first floor. And they usually stay on the first floor. This is a double-edged sword because it means that there have been several, um, surprise encounters with insects in my ground-level kitchen and bathroom. But the good news is that my second-level bedroom is usually bug-free.

So I proceed with caution when I'm downstairs. I'm afraid of a run-in with the seven-legged spider that taunts me from my ceiling, or with the cockroaches that like to hang out behind my bathroom door. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. (This, from a girl who enthusiastically hunted bugs n' butterflies during her youth. A girl who proudly co-won The Biggest Bug in Riverton Contest at age seven. What have I become?)

I'm cockier when I'm upstairs. There's never any bugs. I prance around like I own the place (I may pay the rent, but I certainly don't "own" my apartment -- the wildlife calls all the shots).

This was my mindset when I opened the bottom drawer of the dresser in my usually-bug-free bedroom a couple of days ago. I wanted to pull out a pair of sweatpants to go for a jog. I've painted my dresser a cheery yellow. (I like the color. It goes well with the lime green of my interior walls and the very subdued peach of the exterior. Read: sarcasm). But that day, that yellow hue contrasted eerily with what was inside the drawer...

...a seething black mass of ants. Hundreds and hundreds of ants. Crawling all over my pants.

I literally had ants in my pants. (My grandmother pointed this out when I was recounting this disturbing story to her on the phone over the weekend.)

I didn't know how to react. I was too shocked to scream. So I pulled out the entire drawer and threw it out on the balcony outside my bedroom. Pants and shorts and neighbors be damned. I then ran down the stairs and out of my apartment.

OK. I overreacted a little bit.

I steered clear of my apartment for several hours. With a clearer mind, I thought through what would have been smarter reaction scenarios, like calmly carrying the drawer downstairs to the garden, away from my bedroom, and letting the critters crawl out freely. But I didn't do that. And, because I'd overreacted, I'd likely return home to a bedroom full of ants. D'oh!

When I finally did make it back to my apartment, I crept up the stairs to my bedroom. I gingerly flicked on the lights, expecting to see my walls teeming with tiny black ants. But my bedroom was empty.

I carefully opened the door to my balcony, again, expecting to find dark masses crawling all over the floor. No ants.

I hesitantly stepped out on the balcony, reached down to pick up one of the many pairs of pants scattered all over the floor, and shook them. No ants.

I picked up the discarded drawer. No ants.

So I stuffed ALL of my pants into three big plastic bags and dropped them off at the laundry mat the next morning. Eight kilos of clothes. Quite the laundry bill. The clerk looked at the pile of pants with a raised eyebrow. I tried to explain myself, but somehow, the "ants in my pants" idiom kind of got lost in translation...

Shamelessly Stereotypical in Guatemala

It's the stuff stereotypes, the subplot of every bad Hollywood film ever made about life South of the Border: The sombrero-clad, big-moustached, gold-teeth-sporting Mexican taxi driver/police officer/souvenir vendor are supposed to trick the silly, fanny-pack-wearing, camera-laden, map-consulting gringo tourist out of his every last peso. The Mexicans are the rip-offers and the gringos are the rip-offees. And that's the way it is.

Now, I don’t usually subscribe to such stereotypes. I don’t consider myself a fiscally clueless gringa, nor have I ever had a problem with getting ripped off in Mexico. Nonetheless, when traveling with three street-savvy Mexican guys through Guatemala last week, the last thing I expected to be was ripped off. After all, with the Mexicans, there'd be no language barrier to overcome, no tourist traps to avoid, and, of course, the green-eyed, blonde-haired, freckle-faced factor wouldn't apply in their case.

But, at the end of the day, despite our attempt to avoid the touristy, we were all -- three Mexicans and an American -- foreign tourists in Guatemala. And, at the end of the day, we got ripped off. Really ripped off. Milked for our every last quetzal. (FYI, the Quetzal is a very colorful bird, and is also the name of the currency in Guatemala, which I will denote with a “Q” moving forward.)

There were the usual tourist snares: The shop owner in Flores who charged us Q10 for postcard stamps whose actual price was Q4. The restaurant in El Relleno that delivered a bill for Q80 (that’s $10 USD, folks!) for a few stale tortilla chips served with lukewarm beans. The tour boat operator in Livingston who stalked us mercilessly on his scooter, finally convinced us to take his boat, and then left us sitting on the dock for 40 minutes.

But the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was Hotel Suli, a complete dive of an accommodation located along a hot, smelly, traffic-ridden street in Rio Dulce, a coastal city we found ourselves in at about 1 am on Friday morning. Foolishly, we’d rolled into Rio Dulce without a hotel reservation on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year. Homeless and sleepy, we crowded around a dingy map posted on the side of the road, thumbing through our guidebooks and calling hotels, increasingly disheartened to find that everything was full.

We met a cab driver (who, for the record, was a saint of a man, a refreshing change from other Guatemalan cab drivers we’d met in our journey who’d overcharged us mercilessly). The taxista drove us around the town, stopped to help us inquire at hotels, lent us his cell phone, and then, when all options seemed to be exhausted, offered us a place to stay in his home.

We should have taken the cab driver up on his offer to sleep on his floor.

Shoulda coulda woulda.

But, as (bad) luck would have it, we pulled into Hotel Suli at about 2:30 am, shortly after four guests had apparently left the hotel without paying. This left their room free and the hotel clerk anxious to fill it to recover his losses -- and unfortunately, with no housekeeping staff available to clean the room, this also left us with dirty sheets and a soggy bathroom floor. But, at the time, it seemed better than sleeping on the street -- or inconveniencing the poor cab driver. The hotel clerk cut what seemed like a deal --charging us a three-person rate for four people -- and we sprawled out in the room, sleeping like babies.

That is, sleeping like babies until we were woken by banging on the door at 7am.

It was the same clerk, sent by the hotel owner to inform us that the price of this particular room had increased by Q100, and that, if we’d like to stay another night, we needed to pay him them and now.

Looking back on the scenario, the situation was laughable. But in the moment, sleep-deprived and fed up -- the memories of overpriced stamps and nachos and taxi rides still fresh in our minds -- we let him have it. What, exactly, kind of hotel was this? What kind of hotel tells its customers one price, and then, not five hours later, shamelessly raises that price? And what kind of hotel wakes its guests at 7am to demand payment for the next day?!?

We threatened to leave, and the clerk backed down. In the end, we were able to negotiate a fair price on two smaller rooms -- complete with clean sheets and towels. But just as the stereotype of Mexicans as the proverbial rip-offers didn’t hold true, the stereotype of Guatemala being a dirt-cheap country didn’t pan out either. Don’t believe the hype. You’ll spend quetzales like you'll drink (bottled) water.

There is one stereotype that I did find to be true: Despite the glitzy tourist brochures and bloated prices and throngs of travelers, there is, sadly, still heartbreaking poverty in Guatemala. Most of the positive things I experienced in Guatemala -- the charm of the cobblestone streets of colonial Antigua; the breathtaking views of the volcano-ringed Lake Atitlán; the magic and mystery of the Mayan ruins of Tikal; the thrill of riding a zip line over the jungle; the things I've included in happy snapshots here -- will never be experienced by many Guatemalans in their own country because they can't afford the obscenely high prices.

I think this is why I was so upset about getting ripped off. I didn't feel angry. I felt guilty. A nagging feeling of shame clouded my every financial transaction. It wasn't an issue of an extra Q100 here and there. It was an issue of lining the pockets of the already-well off (much of the tourism industry in Guatemala is foreign-owned) when their neighbors (native Guatemalans) had nothing. (Note: I did find it refreshing that the Guatemalan government offers a radically reduced "national" fee of Q25 for nationals to visit Tikal. The price for foreigners is Q150, or about $30 USD. But, despite the discount at Tikal, you'd still have to pay the bloated bus prices or be wealthy enough to have a car to get you there.)

Damn you, stereotypes! At the end of the day, despite the best-laid plans, I was the stereotypical gringa tourist getting ripped off in Guatemala. Riding the stereotyptical tourist bus and snapping the stereotypical snapshots of the stereotypical poverty-stricken countryside. The situation would have been kind of a buzzkill, had my cynical side not gotten a kick out of seeing my Mexican travel companions getting un-stereotypically ripped off, too. At least we were in it together.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda. Next time, we're staying with the taxi driver.

Shit! Sheet!

I get hit up to buy stuff all the time. Glasses of fruit-flavored water off carts in the street. Cups of arroz con leche out of a basket on a woman's head on the sidewalk. Chopped-up cactus from little old ladies. Plastic plug-in crucifixes with flashing lights from corner shops. Couches, refrigerators, doorknobs and you-name-it out of the backs of trucks.

"Hey güera! Do you want to buy [insert name of product I don't have any use for]?"

Usually these sales pitches come from strangers, most often when I'm walking down the street, going to or coming from work. So I was surprised when a student stopped by my office to hit me up at work last week.

Scratch that. It wasn't the location that threw me. It was the language. Here's what I heard as the student stepped through my office door:

"Hi teacher! Do you want to buy a shit?"

Potty mouth. Now obviously, the student was NOT selling feces. But his unique sales pitch certainly caught my attention. I wasn't quite sure how to reply:

"Ummm, are you sure you're selling shit?"

He turned red. Our students here at the university usually don't speak a lot of English before they come to study with us, but by the time they're ready to graduate, they know enough to be dangerous -- enough to know that "shit" is on the list of words that you don't use with your professors.

"No?" He meekly showed me his wares: pictures of sheets and blankets that his mom had sewn.

Now, it's full-on summertime here. Well into the nineties (F) in the morning. The last thing I wanted to buy was more things to sweat through on my bed. But I didn't turn the student away. I needed to make sure that he didn't pitch shit to his next potential customer. So I shut my door, ready to get down to business.

"Look at my mouth. Listen and look at how I say these words."

The good teacher that I am, I carefully pronounced 'shit' and 'sheet' for him a few times. He got the idea. He packed up his pictures, thanked me, and left my office.

I could hear him walking down the hall with his friend, who had been waiting outside my office door for him. Their words bounced off of our building's concrete walls. They were practicing their vocabulary.

Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. Shit.

Sheeeeeeeeeet. Sheeeeeeet. Sheet.

Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

Sheeeeeeeeet.

Funny as shit, eh?