Oh thank God, I'm done, I'm done.

Yes, dear friends, I quit. It's been a long time coming, but I finally hit my wall and made the decision to switch to a full-time stay-at-home doggie lover. My new job starts training in one week so I have plenty of time to listen to tortilla squeaks over the next seven days.

Carnaval is over. I had assumed it was going to be the Minnesota state fair in Mexico with the same population of gringos flooding the streets - this was, in fact, what had occurred to me on my first Carnaval night out over the prior weekend: I haven't seen this many pasty-looking people since I'd been to the Great Minnesota Get-Together. In any case I was determined to be appropriately annoyed and disdainful of the tourists and-thus-demonstrate-my-snobbish-superiority-as-a-local, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. On Tuesday night I canceled my night class and Mono, Juarez, and I headed down to the Palacio Municipal. Juarez played a rubber ducky fishing game and won an oversized fuzzy cigarette, with which he then made inappropriate jokes referring to dildos before graciously gifting it to some young innocent sipping his Coca-cola under a fair tent. The three of us continued on, bought our drinks, and began making our way down the chaos formerly known as the Malecón.

The Malecón is the road/sidewalk that you see in the picture above. It's the one area that cruise shippers see, and it's quite lovely and nice and has lots of bars and restaurants and souvenir shops and whatnot. On Tuesday night it was PACKED. As in every square inch. It has a divided two-direction road, and for several fun hours a continuous parade of floats made their way up and down. Lots of fun, not just waving douche-bags on a car, but salsa music and people getting there freak on aboard heavy machinery and beads and candy and whatnot. Mono, Juarez, and I were aiming for one chunk of friends, but we ran into another and spent the parade with them. This was the same group we spent Christmas with, so I re-bonded with the little girls and was invited in on all of their photo ops with sponge bob and the like, while their mothers posed next to overly-muscular men wearing speedos and high tops.

I saw a bunch of students and it made me kind of sad because I knew my demise at the school was imminently awaiting me. Also ashamed to realize they'ed seen me dancing, particularly since Mono and no one else in that friends chunk was dancing except me and the little girls. One of my students, Francisco, who's about 7-years-old I think, offered me beads and then kissed me on the cheek. Is that adorable or what? Never mind that earlier in the year I'd had to tape him to his chair so that he would just for gods sake hold still for two minutes. Ineffective, by the way, he ended up lying on his side, still in sitting position with the chair attached, but absolutely thrilled by the experience of it.

Anyway, as far as the work situation goes, I have my training on Thursday with the online company and I also sent out a resume for a job teaching primary at a school a bit outside of Moscow. I partly think this is just asking for misery and depression, but I have a secret longing to go and live in Russia

for a year and become and expert in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and have a look at the mushroom headed cathedrals.

Now it's the end of the weekend which normally for me would mean lesson planning and being crabby in general (also happy hour at Jeanie's). But since my life has undergone a drastic transformation, I no longer have to work in the morning and can instead upon the good advice of my mother get entirely wasted and spend the following 24 hours in hangover hell while the rest of you poor bastards are busy being useful contributions to our greater global society. Manchas and I have other plans.