Belanova and Other Odds and Ends this Last Week...Also, How Everything is a Blur

Everything's getting to be a freakin' blur these days. Seriously.

Wednesday

Excursion to Juanzanito I think it was called, an island outside of Patzcuaro. Boatse were involved...of course, that makes sense. There will be yet another Patzcuaro excursion this coming Tuesday to see a traditional healer. Apparently on one of the traditional healer trips with a group of nursing students someone got cured of a curse but didn't believe it afterwards. I have no idea, but if so, it creates some interesting theological implications.

Thursday

I forget what the hetts we did today, except that I did bug a friend to see if she could watch on Facebook when I changed my relationship status from undeclared to single (undeclared status doesn't show at all on your profile...) Basically, I wasn't declared as single before, and wasn't even declared as straight until a few months ago. But I heard a rumor that if people see you going single in their news-feed on Facebook, even if you weren't in a relationship before, it still shows up as a broken heart. I'm going to make you wait for the result of the experiment because it's only two sections down.

Friday

The same thing here, for the daytime.

I'm going to talk about Belanova, which is an electro-pop musical group that Christian, a guy who works at the Central Universitario de Michaocan, recommended to me. At the time of this writing I am digesting the track "Te Quedas O Te Vas" (You Stay or You Go) which has a freaking amazing bassline. As in, to Uncle Scott, if you're reading: I think you'll dig this track, and to everyone else: I think Uncle Scott, and possibly you, will dig this track. Technically Belanova is electro-pop, but this is definitely a disco-house track, in my opinion. So it's the the electronic music that the generation of my parents is probably most likely to enjoy. The only thing is I translated the lyrics and they're sort of depressing. As in, here's the first part in English:

I think that time will resolve this (calmly or indifferently, I think is the word)
Don't spend your life crying for yourself
The world will spin
With or without you it goes
I don't think you want to stay here and die

Which if not for the song's amazingly awesome funky bassline and fun fun fun strings and...frankly, the singer has an awesome voice, too...if not for all the great groove elements the song would be quite depressing.

Friday night I went to this place called the Re (um-lauts on the e) Bar which was having a three-DJ concert. Each DJ played some trance, with it getting progressively more energetic and less relaxation-style. It was all pretty good, though, with the exception of an overly abrasive synth here and there. The place also had good atmosphere.

Saturday

Saturday morning I went to the school insanely early because we were leaving at seven in the morning to go to...dangit, now I've forgotten the name of the town! But miners were involved, as were key figures in Mexican independence. Apparently four of them were beheaded, and their heads hung in one of the museums we visited, for ten years!

But anyway, Saturday morning I went to the school insanely early and actually met the friend who helped me with my Facebook experiment. She told me the feed had indeed shown a broken heart, which made me insanely happy. That's got to be one of the funniest things ever. As a refresher, it's funny because it systematically assumed someone declaring their status as single is leaving a relationship, even when (as in my case) there's no relationship to leave.

Anyway, we did lots of other stuff. A couple of other museums (including one of more naturally "mummified" corpses, and another which was actually the house of Diego Riviera.) The corpses were cool but sort of frightening. Some of them had it seemed been buried alive and I think Dr. Gallegos confirmed this.

A bunch of us went to a restaurant in...Guanajuato, that was it! And we had a wonderful discussion about relationship problems. We'd had another variation of that discussion at a restaurant a few weeks before, San Pancho, and this one was just as fun. The basic argument of the discussion, I'll outline a bit later.

At a restaurant/bar we went to later that night we had another discussion which was related tangentially to the first. This is your warning to cover your little ones' eyes.

A few people were discussing sexual experiences that they had had on one side of me. I wasn't involved in that so much but I was involved in the closely related discussion right next to it. I had shared that I planned on saving myself for marriage and had used the bases analogy to do so. Basically I said I'd stay off third and fourth bases as those are the things I believe constitute sex, and I would probably avoid second as well (first is kissing...I hope you can fill in the blanks) because the farther you go the easier it is to go farther.

The discussion was actually quite humorous and we actually agreed there should be five bases to accomodate other, erm, acts that didn't really belong on any of the established bases. My absolute rule, for the record, remained to stay off third or higher and preferably (for your assurance, my family, that's just short of being an absolute rule) off of second. Christian also explained to some of us the Mexican slang that has gone into discussion of sex, which was funny.

Actually, I'm just going to say, it's a rule for me, it's where my standards are going to be set. Partly because I'm not comfortable with grey areas and partly because I'm especially not comfortable with grey areas that could compromise me morally.

Anyway, the really awesome thing that happened was that one of the other guys at the table, who was in on my discussion, wished me good luck with saving myself for marriage. After a bit of discussion on that comment (I defended it; it's not like it'll be easy to do) he told me that seriously, he wished me good luck. I really appreciated what he had to say about that.

After that place, which had some pretty nice acoustic-guitar-ish music, we went to a club called the Capitolio which was pretty nice. It was sort of in-between Ego and Carlos and Charlie's in atmosphere and "nice-ness." I left way early, as did my roommate for the weekend. It was alright, but I preferred the other places. Maybe because more people went and there were, as such, more people I felt comfortable dancing with.

One other thing about Saturday: I read two chapters of the book of James in Spanish. It's Spanish Spanish, so it uses the vosotros (you plural) tense, instead of a contextual usage of third-person plural with a designated noun Ustedes, but it was qutie readable and knowing the book made it easier. Saturday night I took an opportunity after getting home way early (as usual) from the discoteque to walk around the hotel a bit and pray. I'm glad I did because I'm finally getting past some things that have been bugging me for ranges of weeks to months to a over a year now. I'm glad because it's looking like this could be a time of spiritual renewal for me which was one of the things I sort of wanted to do going into the experience of Morelia to begin with.

Also, I started reading Borges' Ficciones again. Enjoying it again. Restarted the story I was on, though.

Sunday

Pretty much the biggest event was me sitting down to type this. I also had a fun religious discussion with a friend on the way back from Guanajuato.

Everything Else

That's pretty much it for this week. Everything's a blur because stuff's stopped going slowly and started going quickly. Can't wait to be back in the states.

Oh yeah, the romance debate (hoping for comments on this):

Can a man and a woman be very good friends (as in, just short of or best friends) without one person or the other having an attraction (not merely physical) to the other?

Can this sort of friendship even occur unless at some point there has been such an attraction on one or both sides?

Is it ethical for one party in such a friendship to maintain the friendship at its level if the other party is interested in the one romantically?