Grandma´s Birthday

Grandma and I

All my cousins, grandma and uncle Joel

On Saturday June 23, 2012, my grandma turned 73. It was a day for as much celebration as it was tears. My grandma is pretty damn old and her age is slowly catching up to her. There is no one out there like her. She’s always supported my two cousins, Mario and Edson, and myself. Between all four of us there is a very special bond. When I was born, my grandparents both went to visit me in LA and bought a tv which still sits today in the living room of my grandma’s house and works without a problem. “That thing is as old as you,” she always tells me.

My grandma has always housed me when I visit Mexico and it is exactly where I am now writing this blog post on Microsoft that I will save on a flash drive and take to a cyber café once the sun rises in about four hours. This three-story house has a lot of history. Both good and bad, but that’s a story for another time. But the house, it represents a good part of me. As kids, Edson and I used to play soccer on the roof/third floor while my grandma put the clothes out to dry. On the second floor my uncle Ivan, cousins Mario, Edson, Diego and I used to all get together and play Mario Kart 64 together. There is also a bathroom on the second floor with an electrical plug that I used to shock myself with when I got bored. And on the first floor is the living room where the entire family would always get together and the kitchen where we would all sit at eat grandma’s delicious food.

These days that I long for sometimes are all gone and disappeared years ago. Everyone has grown up and gotten married. For god’s sake, in February my grandma turned into a great grandma.

But back to my grandma. I find her very special. Strong woman. My grandpa died about eighteen years ago and yet my grandma has still been able to pay for her bills without a problem. She provided a home for my aunt and two cousins when they had nothing and paid for their k-12 education. Like I said earlier, her age is catching up to her, so between the entire family essentially now we take care of her. I love spending time with my grandma, but like everyone else in the family, fear the day when she doesn’t wake up.

As an atheist, it would be a bit weird if I said “I hope God takes care of her in heaven” but I’m not and I actually do hope that when the day comes when she no longer sees the light of day and hears the sounds of roosters waking the whole block up, that the ground take good care of her bones. I hope I’ll be there to say at least one last goodbye but who knows. When my grandmother on my father’s side of the family died in March of 2004, I was not able to go to the funeral in Mexico, but watching the pain that my father went through in the process of the days before her death was hard enough. Nothing was more gut wrenching than the day she could no longer recognize his voice. My dad spent twenty years acting like a father to all my aunts and uncles alongside my grandma and for her to just be able to identify him hurt even me.

The moral of these stories always ends with “love a person while they’re still living because there is nothing you can do when they’re dead.” But that’s not the moral of my story here, mine is to enjoy my own life surrounded by the people I love while I’m alive. I constantly place my own life at risk. I’m a cyclist to say the least and to not recognize that would be pretty stupid on my behalf. I got hit once already and there is nothing that can’t say I might get hit again soon and lose a limb or my life. I sit on ledges with 100 feet between myself and the ground just for a pretty picture. One little thing can easily go wrong and there I go. When I die, I want people to look at my pictures and go, “well, looks like he did have a lot of fun at that show with America, Irving, Kim and Gio.” I smile a lot and give other loads of smiles. Enjoy then while they’re still around because you never know when I’ll smile for one last time.

Anyways, it’s 2:30 am. I need my sleep even though I’m not even sure what we’re doing today. Til next time blog.

Mosquitos

My entire body is covered in mosquito bites it’s just mother fucking ridiculous. As you can see in the pictures, we’re not talking about five or ten, it’s low triple digits. I have forty from my thigh to my knee on my right leg. I have so many on my left arm, I decided to connect the dots for fun but too bad it isn’t pictured too well. Damn you dark skin. I wish I would show you the mosquito bites on my hands. The back of my palms have about seven or eight each and each finger had at least two with some even having five. I want to just scratch them but with my mind control I’ve been preventing myself. Some have begun to go away but others look like they’ll still be around for another week or two, especially the ones on my feet. The pain is just GAH. Maybe by the time I have another opportunity to post something they’ll be gone. But for now, the pain is unbearable. It’s about to be 2 a.m. and I need to get some rest. Good night everyone.

Black Sheep

Visiting Mexico is always a great feeling. There is no feeling in the world that matches hanging out with all my uncles and cousins: laughter and humiliation. Just because I’m vacationing in Mexico and visiting everyone doesn’t mean I’m not reminded of my inability to speak Spanish on the level of everyone else. I am one of three people (the other two are my cousins Justin and Brandon) in the entire family that have Spanish as their second language. My control of the rules and verbs, adjectives as well as tenses and the labeling of male and female are all pretty shitty to say the least. My cousins still bug me about saying “la bano” instead of “el bano,” “Polandia” instead of “Polonia,” and “sambutar” instead of “sambutir.”

Due to my long hair, my uncle Robert calls me “Jesus Christ” every five minutes. My uncle Joel calls me “mosh” and my cousin Edson calls me “Pepe Nacho.” But my cousin has been changing my nickname constantly so by now I’ve los track. All my uncle Oscar does is joke about cutting all my hair and asking “what would you do if I cut it all off while you were sleeping?”

The entire family is sarcastic to say the least and insanely hilarious but after a while I feel like I’m about to give in and go off on everyone. No one in the entire family is as big of a joke punching bag than I am. I get shit for my hair, clothes, music. I get made fun of for what I say and what I don’t say. The big joke that all my uncles always bring out on me is the “misma playa” joke from about ten years ago. What happened was that I complained that we always visited the same beach (hence “misma playa”) because my grandma didn’t want anyone to risk getting hurt. 100% logical, but the problem was that the water at the beach for a good 20 feet is only about ankle high. I complained with my obviously not well developed Spanish and said “siempre misma playa.” Now, after so many years, it is still the heart of all jokes. I got tired of it many years ago but can’t really do much, just got to suck it in and take every punch. There is still a long road left to take before the joke disappears, until then, one step at a time.

Average

Being myself has its positives, negatives and purgatories. I attempt to be as likable as a person as I can within the boundaries of who I am. I wear a smile on my face everyday because that is exactly what makes me well...me. I have a tendency to make people laugh as it's just part of who I am. Some days I have my hair all down, others in a pony tail and when not taking myself seriously, in a bun. I wear black all day everyday. 3/4ths of my shirts are not family friendly. I drink water out of a fossett and love to eat peanut butter. If I could, I would have sleeve tattoos on both arms and wear my pentagram Arch Enemy shirt that reads "Pure Fucking Metal" on the back. But at the same time, I'm a family person, or at least I attempt to be. I hang out with my mom. I try to only wear my more gruesome clothing when going to school and to concerts. I get along really well with other people's parents. I respect others' religion and have a calendar with kittens on it. On the purgatory level, friends are some of the worst and easiest to find, let alone to keep. But my best friends are the most random set of awesome people I've ever known in my life and I plan on keeping every single one until they day I die. Relationships...haha what is there to say but I'm too metal for others I guess. They don't like black and they don't like long hair, well fucking sucks to be you huh. I'll keep looking, someone has to exist. (back to friends/other people) People either like me or they don't. I don't conform to anything and don't dress to please anyone. I don't expect people to find my manner of dress acceptable anyways. My influences come from various phases both past and present. Cargo pants from my youth. Black clothes from metal. Bright clothes from my love of the color green. Soccer jerseys. A messanger bag from cycling as well as rolling up the right side of my pants. If there is one thing I'm not asking for, it's acceptance. I don't want to be another cog in the machine that is society. I just want to people to understand one thing, I'm Jaziel, I listen to fucking heavy metal and if my shirt offends you, well that's your problems. I'm not average and I never plan on being it. Have a nice day.

Europe: A League of It's Own

I currently find myself in the Czech Republic. Prague to be exact. Beautiful city. Anyways, I feel like I'm losing my mind out here in Europe. My uncle and I are here for a total of 10 days, it's been 6 already, and it appears we're more of a sight seeing bus, than actual tourists. As much as the sights are beautiful and the difference of the city feeling between the United States and all of Europe, I'm slowly beginning to dislike this trip. My uncle makes us travel 20 minutes to get off the train, take like 3 pictures and off we go to our next destination. We're not even really enjoying these places at all. Or at least I'm not.

The beautiful architecture of Budapest. Can I live here?

Secondly, my uncle has us going in circles and getting lost constantly. It was fun and hilarious the first two days, but now I'm seriously beginning to get frustrated. The monuments and historical buildings are all essentially lined up with the parliament and Holocaust memorial being like two blocks off the path in separate directions (so no reason why all the main tourist attractions can't be seen in a single day). In what should have taken us 6 hours maximum, took us three days because we zigzagged the whole thing and ping ponged off of all of the historical locations. The only exceptions to the line of monuments is the painted Berlin wall on the south east side of the city and the Olympic stadium on the northwestern part of the city. One would think that you would save the wall and Olympic stadium for a single day right?, nope. On Saturday morning we went to the Berlin wall and

Checkpoint Charlie (middle of the city), bused it to the painted Berlin wall and walked the whole thing (south east/ 2 mile walk give or take)

and then trained it to the Olympic stadium (north west).

 On Sunday, we decided it was going to be a chill day (since it would be our last in Berlin and going to fly that night to Budapest) and would only visit the Holocaust memorial and some random church in the south side of the city that had been bombed during the war. Well it turned it turned out that the memorial was about 3 blocks from Checkpoint Charlie.

In Budapest and Vienna, we were taking subway trips from one place to the next (getting off on every stop) even though they were all roughly five to ten minutes from each other.

I don't know, but at the end of the day, I feel like I'm stressing myself out because this trip is not going as my own mind had it planned. I'm probably just going to sit back and let this trip plan out its own fate. If the two pictures and moving on continues, well then so be it. I'm still enjoying the sights so why complain.

It's a castle...seriously.

I'm just using this to set my mind free. Maybe this was all an effect from sitting in a train cart at 2 in the morning, filled in a little slot where five other people slept and using my iPod listening to The Number Twelve Looks Like You and Panda. Until next time, have a good day everyone. I should sleep now, it's almost 2:30 am.