Thursday, October 16

Yesterday, I had four friends, who I consider to be among my closest here, over to my house to work on an English assignment. The assignment was to make a complete newspaper in English, including every section we thought worthwhile, documenting events in the school, which of course leaves almost total creative freedom. We titled ours "Dead Cat." I'm getting ahead of myself, anyhow. Javier, having left school early to get a passport, came back to pick up Dalid, Lasserre, Deyanira and I from school and bring us to my house. I am sorry I have not built up descriptions of my friends over the time I have known them; you all have no way to know who these people are beyond their pictures. Rest assurred that they are all very unique, beautiful people.

After I'd changed my clothes, we left the house again to pick up supplies at the paper and office supply store across the street, attached to Soriana. Soriana is the biggest grocery store chain in this area, and the building itself is rather large. We set to work in the living room, with Dalid and Deya and Javier writing articles, and Lasserre wrangling the giant sheets of paper and drawing the title and frills, while I translated anything they finished.

About halfway through the night, my mom invited us all into the kitchen to share a dinner of noodle soup and tacos. It was somehow extremely refreshing and cozy to eat with close friends in this setting. I never truly eat alone here, but Pedro makes bitter, rude company in the morning, and I don't seem to eat with anyone at school. At home, we eat as a family, but even then there is the odd fact that my mom doesn't eat with us, instead essentially acting as a cook/waitress for us until we are almost done.

We finished writing and translating all the articles by 7, and everyone left shortly after. One more notable event of the night was that Javier and Dalid kissed, and made Deyanira and Lasserre do the same. Something similar happened in class earlier, when they had me kiss both Deya and Bola. None of these seem to be serious at all; I am not sure how it can be explained beyond "teenage sexuality."