Notes From A Day In Mexico City

I spent most of yesterday in Mexico City, which is why I didn't post an entry. I went in to conduct interviews for a story on extreme mommy makeovers. Some women in Mexico are having liposuctions done immediately following a C-section. I spoke to one woman who had a hysterectomy and a liposuction during a five and a half hour visit to the operating theater. She was brutally frank and graphic. Great interview. Later I spoke to a Brazilian plastic surgeon wearing electric blue pants. He spoke in portuñol about performing plastic surgery on postpartum women. Beautiful thing about being a journalist is that you are given carte blanche to talk to just about anyone about almost anything.

I spent a good part of the day on the Metro just getting from one place to another. Mexico City is not a beautiful city. Its attraction lies strictly in its vitality - the palpable sensation that twenty million souls engulf you. If the Zócalo is the heart of the city, then the sprawling subway system is the city's intestines. I rode the blue, pink and brown Metro lines. As usual, there was a steady stream of vendors who come aboard to hawk their wares. The first sold gum. The second, fourth and fifth sold pirated compact discs. The third tried to sell a set of plastic silverware for five pesos, a little less than fifty cents. Later at one of the stations there were people selling chocolate-covered raisins, chocolate bars, more pirated compact discs and finally on my last subway ride a blind man sought payment for loudly reciting poetry.

The train was packed. I was reading, appropriately enough, Maximum City by Sukethu Mehta. It is a paean to Bombay. When I read I have the capacity to tune out most distractions. I heard what I thought was someone touting a product. I read on until suddenly I heard "Hombres necios que acusáis a la mujer sin razón." I looked up, then. It is the opening line of a famous poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. I could not see the man even though he was not more than five feet away. I stopped reading and listened. Poem done, the man began to berate everyone around him calling us stingy and every imaginable synonym thereof. He accused us of being deaf. He was blind, or so he said.   

Comments

[Edward]

This note in its compiling of unrelated events lost its potential for either compelling reporting or provocative thought...