Nuisance Product

This morning my weight’s back down to an even 214, from a high of 225 when we first arrived here. I really packed on the pounds in the last month or so before the move. I remember reading a few weeks ago that Mexico is now the second fattest country in the world, after the US, on its way to first place in the next 10 years or so. So you can eat as well or as poorly down here as you want. If you want corn syrup and transfats, this is as good a place as any to be.

It’s amazing how little people are interested in talking about the relationship between corn subsidies and the global obesity epidemic. Farmers are subsidized by governments to grow corn, because it’s a shitty inefficient parasite-susceptible high-maintenance crop, and that’s just what governments do. So there’s this excess on the global market of a food commodity that has minimal nutritional value, and which is essentially an agricultural waste product. So then whole industries spring up to find creative ways of giving that nuisance product something to do. We might as well be putting glass and asbestos dust into food and calling it added value for all the good corn adds to the quality of the Western diet.

Along with transfats, Corn syrup especially has emerged as THE culprit in the spread of obesity around the world, and corn syrup is in practically everything. It’s not really about “carbs” or “sugars” or “fat”. But now there’s this giant global distribution machine in place to disseminate a nutritionally worthless by-product of a nutritionally mediocre crop as far and as wide as possible, protected by layers of entrenched bureaucracy and protectionist subsidies. So we can’t realistically look to governments to be leaders, or even allies in the battle against global obesity.

Five Weeks

Five weeks in Guadalajara, and I’m only now beginning to feel like I can stop making comparisons to Vancouver. It’s not that I really have any bad feelings about Vancouver – it’s totally the opposite. I spent 13 years in Vancouver, over a quarter of my life to date and I loved it, despite my little snarks. In a way, since I started going out with Ken almost immediately after I moved there, you could say my life began in Vancouver. I miss a lot of things about Vancouver; I miss my friend Alec, but now Guadalajara really feels like home.

We’re heading into the hot season now, and it’s starting to really cook in the early afternoons. We usually do most of our work in the evenings. It’s starting to be bug season too and we’ve seen a couple of baby cucarachas on the patio as well as some ants, hunting spiders and a couple of really enormous crickets. The other night we were walking home and saw a parade of leaf cutter ants. We tracked the line to the new nest they were building, beneath the roots of an old tree almost a full city block from the tree they were disassembling. We watched a couple of ants who’d gotten confused and picked up some pieces of cellophane disappear into the nest, only to emerge a few moments later, chastened and humiliated. Evenly spaced along the line were big warrior ants, and one of them gave Ken a nasty little nip on the leg.

Not a drop of rain since we arrived, but that’ll change soon. When we were down last summer, we caught the tail end of the rainy season. Every afternoon, vast thunderheads would materialize out of a blue sky and the city would be deluged for 20 minutes along with spectacular lightning. At night clouds would glide over the city lit from within by lightning flashes, sometimes as many two or three a second. That’s not far away, and I’m looking forward to it. Guadalajara is parched right now, and a fine film of dust settles over every surface by the end of the day. Dusting the entire house is part of the morning routine, and you quickly get used to keeping surfaces as uncluttered and Spartan as possible.

Strangely, one of the hardest things to get used to is the total absence of any kind of recycling program in the state of Jalisco. Meticulous recycling is just so ingrained in me after 13 years in Vancouver that I can’t throw paper and glass into a regular garbage bag without feeling like a criminal. And yet…I have to say it gives me a perverse little thrill too. I like to think that for every can and plastic container I toss into the garbage here, a deliciously cruel variant of the Butterfly Effect causes someone on Commercial Drive to get a gray hair.

Okay, Maybe I Do Have Just a Teensy Little Internet Problem

So today I was looking for some 3D models and textures on Turbosquid and DAZ, and the next thing I know I’ve been surfing blogs for over an hour. It’s really more difficult than I was expecting to cut myself off for a month – I didn’t even last a day! I even ended up leaving comments on a couple of sites, without even thinking about it. Is that an addiction, or just a lazy habit I use to fill up dead time between tasks? If it was interfering in my work and my life, I’d say addiction, but it doesn’t really stop me from doing anything important, so I’ll just go with bad habit and try again tomorrow.

I guess if I was into the whole time management thing, I could think of a thousand more productive things to do instead of scanning headlines and comments. But I hate time management, or at least, I hate the idea that every moment of every day has to be used productively. I’ve tried that, and even done well at it, but I really never got more quality work done practicing it. Often, Time Management means just filling up life’s quiet leisurely moments with irrelevant busy work – making lists of things you’re perfectly capable of keeping in your head and so on. If I’m going to try to gain back time that I waste surfing, I’d rather spend it going for a coffee with Ken, or just sitting with one of the cats on the couch thinking about nothing in particular.