At last my university
have confirmed that I have a degree! It's taken far
longer than I care to remember to get this far, but at
last it's happened! Admittedly, it's not a high level
degree, or particularly prestigious, but it's all mine.
Sorry for the over-enthusiasm, but I'm quite pleased.
Perhaps now I can get on with doing important things,
like getting to Mexico. K seems happy for me, and I
really want to be with her soon. Success isn't worth much
without her to share it with.
In the last week I've been taking a look
at myself. I've noticed my attitude has changed after
having lived in Mexico. I'm less tolerant of world
ignorance (of which there is much in England) and more
tolerant of other ways of thinking. I went to donate
blood on Friday, and was refused, because I'd been in
Mexico. I had expected that, but when the guy went on to
tell me that it was because I'd been in South America, I
nearly lost it. "South America? Mexico?" "Errrr...."
I used to be unable to listen to my dad without going up
the wall at his many diversions from the subject, pauses,
etcetera. Tonight, I wanted to hear what he had to say,
and kept thinking, I should listen, because who knows
whether I'll be able to hear him talk like this next year?
I don't even know which country I'll be in by then.
The news is beginning to frustrate me.
Kosovo gets in all the coverage of everything. I don't
know what I should be thinking, but I resent being told
how to think. When I was teaching in Guildford, I
listened to a history teacher lecturing in the staff room
about how it was a religious war between Christians (Serbs)
and Muslims (Kosovar), and that Milosevic had adapted
Hitler's plans for genocide. He sounded convincing, but
rhetoric always does - it's not a dialogue. We never hear
the other side. All the papers are filled with the
righteousness of this war, and the justification is that
the Serbs are committing crimes against humanity. What
about all the countries where we haven't intervened? Were
they different? Or is it just because the Balkans are
uncomfortably close to ourselves? It used to frustrate me
in Mexico that everyone seemed to have group amnesia when
it came to Chiapas, but I can see the same thing
happening here.
Perhaps my outrage comes from my desire
to give up smoking. I've tried three times this week, and
have finally managed to go a few hours without a
cigarette. I don't want to still be smoking when I get to
Mexico, and I remember K convincing me once of the damage
smoking does to our lungs. She was able to stop much
easier than I was, and I want to be able to prove that I
can do this for her. For one thing, in England, smoking
is a tremendous waste of money, and if I'm serious about
going to see her, I ought to be able to stop wasting
money on cigs. There's also the health part - I should
love my body and not keep trying to destroy it. If I love
K as much as I know I do, I should look after myself a
lot better. So much for the ambitions, the hard part
comes when withdrawal begins. I've done it loads of times!
