Meandering profound thoughts we already know to be true

lately the house has been filling with dust. There is a lot of dust in the air here. In addition we have a cat which always adds to the general amount of dust and hair floating around. Ale's been applying to schools in the UK and Canada so I've been navigating through the somewhat complex pages of various institutions trying to help her find out all the things you need to be accepted and get scholarships etc, but it's been difficult as It's been so long since I've been in a University. It seems like it's become a lot harder to get into school since I applied. School is big business these days. Long gone are the days when people deluded themselves into thinking that education wasn't totally necessary to make a decent living. School is also big biz in Mexico where many people don't get the opportunity to go even to high school. There are many private "schools" that teach languages, computers, business, trades, or anything that seems more useful than whatever gig you happen to be stuck with at the time. Jobs that pay a decent living wage are hard to come by here and seem to be often gotten though a connection or friend of some kind. Education isn't just the key to a better life, in many cases it could be the key to the better life for the whole family. Anyway, it's not like I'm talking about anything that everyone doesn't already know so I'll just shut up about school now.

It's cold and grey today. I was over at a friends house last night and we had a few beers and I talked about Guatemala with a friend who'd recently been there. There are a few towns that were completely buried by mudslides during the hurricane season. Apparently some houses and people are too difficult to dig for so the entire area has become a grave. It's cold in here when there isn't any sun. I actually feel a little vulnerable. In Canada it never really mattered for me how cold it was outside because I always felt I could run somewhere warm like a coffee shop or exactly like a coffee shop, or simply turn up the heat, but as most dwellings here lack insulation or heating it gets chilly in the winter sometimes. Many businesses have heating but many also don't. The other night we were way out near the freeway at this Taco place. Taco places are generally like a lunch counter and totally open to the outside so it was cold. I found myself actually wanting to be seated near the giant, rotating hunk of meat because occasionally they fire up the propane burner and these gusts of heat would come out even though you always smell like a huge greasy taco after. I never thought I'd feel comfortable and familiar sitting next to a dripping, rotating hunk of meat under harsh fluorescent light, watching a dubbed Steven Segal movie on a black and white TV while huge double trailers kick up dust near the Ford plant - Or did I? As we all know - standards change and why not?