Mexico City family reunion

Family reunion in Mexico City
By: Gina Roman
November 21st, 2010

Being able to welcome the light of a new day is one of the many blessings in life and what’s even better is that those moments are free of cost.
Most of the time I welcome the promise of a new day at the crack of dawn when I’m trying to break a sweat at the gym at 5am or sometimes even at 4:45 or 4:50. YIKES! It sounds crazy but yes, when most people are enjoying their last minutes of snooze I am already up and running. Everyone I know thinks I am REAL nut case because they all enjoy sleeping and I do too but I just can’t get myself to sleep in more and sometimes I get frustrated because I automatically wake up at 5am or before even on Sundays!
I don’t even need a damn rooster to wake me up at 5am like people did back in the day in Mexico (some people in the outskirts of the main cities still do) because they are not that technology friendly. I always laugh and tell myself that I literally wake the rooster up!
Before I came down with a knee injury I was able to focus more on my workouts, I worked out like a savage, I’d always kick my butt at the gym with some intense routines – most of them cardio, indoor or outdoor running especially when I used to compete. Now that I can hardly do anything with my left leg I only do brisk walks so my mind tends to wander around, (if my mind could never stay still before, now it is less likely to do it).
That’s why I love staying busy to avoid myself from thinking because sometimes the more we think, the less we act, our mind can be such a tricky traitor and it paralyzes us.
This weekend even though it was busy there was a lot of idle time so I had a lot of time to think. As hard as I tried to take a nap on the flight to Mexico City (I went to D. F. to take care of a few things), it was impossible. Once again my restless mind kept going around in circles about a million things. I thought about all my plans and goals for 2011 and of course I was so excited to meet a very special friend.
On Friday morning I flew to Mexico City for a few reasons. I arrived to the airport at 8am and I met “G” a friend of mine who I’m very fond of (we met late last year when I was in the midst of the worst crisis I’d ever been through). Despite the fact that we never discussed our personal lives there was always so much more to chat and I guess that is the reason we totally clicked from the get go. I won’t go into details about that time in my life but G helped me get myself esteem back, he was always so polite and, “un verdadero caballero,” a true gentleman like they say in Mexico.
To make the story short, we’ve kept in touch since then AND believe it or not we coincided at the airport in Mexico City. We had breakfast together, we chatted between phone calls and text messages. It cracks me up when he always tells me that he’s never too busy for me and the few times we meet up, he’s always on the phone, on his computer, text messaging someone but I understand completely because he’s a business man and first things first.
We are both completely aware that it is almost impossible to meet up because we live in different countries, our work/business, our schedule, our families, etc. but it doesn’t matter, like I told him on the phone when we talked Tuesday night. Regardless of how seldom we see or email each other, he’s a keeper, he’ll always be just a phone call or email away.
After that I had to run outside to meet the person that I was going to interview for an article I have to write. I can’t talk about this issue for the time being; all I can say is that it was a very intense but productive interview, unlike others not because they haven’t been productive but because of the fact that it was a bit risky. There are many people and information involved and there is so much at stake so I won't even go there.
We drove to have lunch at VIPS, and then we went to his house to get the interview done without interruptions. I found out so many things that I'm not surprised about but it sounds like if we were living in a movie.
I thought I wouldn’t be able to pull through this one but I did. I felt relieved when my cousins picked me up. We went to their house to chat and for an express workout. That was the shortest and lightest workout I’d had in years! Funny because my cousins thought I was so tough on them, they were dripping sweat.
After that I met up my mother, she’s there spending time some with her relatives. There was a huge family reunion on Saturday and I really wanted to see my cousins, aunts and uncles I hadn’t seen in more than 20 years! Some of them I didn’t even know so I was really in the mood of meeting them see what they’re like and chat with them.
On Saturday morning we woke up, got ready and left to the reunion at about 11. I was really in the mood of going out to a quiet bar with my cousins but everybody flaked out at the last minute, “cómo Buenos Mexicanos,” like good Mexicans. I wasn’t surprised or disappointed because I was pretty much dead after the party anyway.
I really don’t know how people have so much energy to party out! I party out VERY seldom and when and if I’m able to get myself together and go out, I can NEVER pull an all nighter or much less dedicate the WHOLE day to just lounge around, eat and, get bored and do NOTHING productive!
Even though I had tons of fun like I hadn’t in years, I felt like I didn’t fit in, I felt like a stranger because our lifestyles don't match at all.
Many times I avoid spending too much time with relatives because they always wonder why I haven’t gotten married or had children. That seems to be their main topic of concern and those things are very suffocating! Plus I hate being the subject of conversation, I despise having to answers questions, give explanations, I hate talking about my personal life and so forth.
Like I said before, we got there at about 11:30am and we left at almost 11pm! That was a LONG time! Even though I was busy dancing, packing down, drinking and chatting, I still missed my quiet weekend! I couldn’t help feeling guilty of not being productive enough.
There was something I found quite interesting, I noticed how everyone has a nickname for everyone and I don’t know how to take that! “negra, cachetón, panzón, cabrón, chaparro, chillón, are some of the names I heard.” I even got one. They think I’m very skinny so they started calling me “huesos,” which means bones or bonny looking. The thing is that I am VERY hyperactive, I can’t sit still for even a minute and they lounge around too much. They think my lifestyle is abnormal because of what I eat and because they think I workout too much.
Nicknaming people is very common among Mexicans, I remember back home when I was in High School and Junior High, Mexican kids were very cruel, they used to call my sisters and I “Chinese bastards,” it really hurt my feelings and made me cry so that must’ve been the reason why I didn’t know what to make out of them addressing each other with a nickname.
There were many things going through my mind since my head was not busy working on something but I was somehow able to escape for about an hour and get a little bit of writing done. I don’t want to break one of my goals (to write) once a week even though it may not be a lot I don’t want to miss a single week without writing and I better get some sleep because there are still a few things to get done before I head back to Guadalajara. I'll get into more detail about this getaway once I'm back in Guadalajara.