I lied. I tried my best not to but I did indeed lie and now I must face the consequences.
Much like Ariana Grande after she inexplicably licked a donut and said ‘I hate America’ (which… points were made), I must now issue a dramatic apology to my “fans.”
To the loyal WIP community – friends, family members, ex-hook-ups who did not want to keep hooking up with me but did for some reason want to subscribe to my newsletter – I’m so sorry.
Despite proudly deeming 2022 the Year of Lying, I do not intend to lie to you! No, I hold myself and Whining in Public (a very serious, peer-reviewed publication) to higher standards. So I stand before you humbly admitting to the following lies:
I said I was not a spontaneous person. This is no longer true. I have since embraced a lifestyle unbound by oppressive, capitalist notions of “plans” or “goals” and informed entirely by vibes. Case in point: when I arrived in Puerto Vallarta after my week in Mexico City, staying longer in Mexico wasn’t even a question. I had barely unpacked my suitcase before logging onto Jetblue dot com and cancelling my flight home. Which brings me to…
I told many friends I would be back in New York on May 2nd. This was a lie. My initial journey was simple enough – a week in Mexico City, a week in Puerto Vallarta, then back to New York. Two weeks should be more than enough, I thought. I thought wrong! I ended up flying back to Mexico City after Puerto Vallarta where I took a few days to let my sunburn(s) heal and go eat at all the vegan places I missed the first go around. Now it is May 12th and I am writing to you not from my apartment but from a cafe in Zipolite, a surf-y beach town on the coast of Oaxaca in Southwest Mexico where everyone is barefoot all the time.
Despite my best efforts, it has been almost three weeks since my last post. Thus, my initial claim that this would be a “weekly” newsletter has been rendered a lie. I have 1,000 excuses for my tardiness, only one of which I will share – I sat down to write this at a coffee shop in Mexico City last week, wrote a lot of it, but then moved my seat to sit next to these two gay-looking guys (I’m allowed to say that!) thinking they seemed cool and they would perceive me as chill and writer-ly and want to hang out with me. Turns out they spent the entire time talking about property taxes and their tenants (they were gay LANDLORDS!) so naturally I had to pack my stuff up and go get a negroni.
I doubled down on the above in an Instagram comment this Sunday when I said “newsletter coming Monday I promiseeeeeeee” – well guess what? That was a lieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. I went for a “quick dinner” instead of finishing my writing and it turned into nearly three hours of me sitting and talking to the server/owner about her fourteen-year-old professional surfer son and how she can streamline her brand to bring in more customers. We’re best friends now — I can’t help myself!!
Now that I’ve got that off my perienelly sunburnt chest – let me tell you why I ended up lying so much.
MY ACCIDENTAL NORTH AMERICAN ADVENTURE TOUR
As soon I got back from Costa Rica in March, I knew I had to book another trip to warmer weather. Also, I just had to leave New York.
New York is a place for people who either have their shit together or (more frequently) pretend to have their shit together. It’s not the place to be if you feel like throwing your hands up and admitting you do not have your shit together – which is kind of my whole vibe right now, if you haven’t noticed. Also, staring at the desk I worked at every day for the last two years, I always felt like I wasn’t doing enough and falling behind and being a lazy piece of shit.
So, after braving the Alaskan cold, I decided I’d head back down south and go to Mexico for the last two weeks of April – plus, Ryan had spring break from his grad program (why do I have so many friends in grad school??? grad school is a disease to which I say get well soon) so he’d join for the first few days in Mexico City.
And that is precisely where our story begins. (Note: because I am now on Week 4 in Mexico and am famously long-winded, I will be pulling a Wicked: The Movie and dividing my Mexico trip up into parts. At least in my case it kind of makes sense?)
I <3 CDMX
If I see you when I’m back in New York, I will most likely unleash a Tom-Cruise-on-Oprah’s-couch-esque rant about how much I love Mexico City.
I think I am one of the last people in Brooklyn to visit CDMX. The city, particularly the Roma Norte / Condesa area where we were staying, feels spiritually aligned to Brooklyn’s sensibilities – if Brooklyn were cleaner and greener and much, much, much warmer. Also CDMX just sounds so cool.
Of course, going off about Mexico City in the year 2022 makes me very late and very passé and very basic – all the cool Brooklynites have been there, done that and moved on to roads less traveled. But I am someone who got a millennial pink Away suitcase mere months ago, someone whose favorite show ever is CBS’ Survivor, and someone who genuinely thinks Imagine Dragons make good music – calling me basic is more of a fact than an insult!
Unlike Brooklyn though, in CDMX you can drive an hour out of the city, a short ways away from the literal tens of thousands of restaurants and bars and cafes, and end up at some massive ancient ruins. We did the trip out to Teotihuacán, a mysterious abandoned city built over two thousand years ago full of giant pyramids. Naturally, because the world is so small, Ryan and I ended up having another pair of twenty-something roommates from New York with us on our Airbnb experience. Shout outs to our girlies Sara and Ana who we instantly befriended, spent the whole day with (in amazing straw hats our host lent us and that I desperately wanted to keep), and ended up seeing a few more times on our trip. There was another couple on our trip that we did not really befriend (they were having a full, multi-outfit photoshoot which… slay) but we did watch one of them eat a plate full of cooked bugs at lunch which was unsettling yet entertaining.
If you haven’t already embraced the Airbnb experience lifestyle, I really can’t recommend it enough. It’s usually cheaper/less conventionally tourist-y than a standard tour company, you get to meet people, and (in most cases, at least) you’re directly supporting someone local. @Airbnb, if you want to sponsor me or hire me, you know where to find me!!!
Speaking of tours… I should disclose now what may be my most controversial opinion (besides the summer I decided to really truly believe the moon landing was a hoax — which… sure, you win, it happened, but I still have questions!!!) which is that I don’t love museums!!! I know it’s a bad take :( I just get bored :(((
So if you ask me if I went to XYZ different museum while I was there – the answer is essentially a No across the board. Sorry!!! But – we did go to the Frida Kahlo house which was great (if annoyingly crowded) and is technically a museum? We also went to Casa Giraldí which is a house designed by this famous architect Luis Barragán that is so weird and beautiful. You can take a tour with this guy who actually grew up inside the house which is amazing because as you’re walking through this marvel of modern design, you can ask him questions like ‘Weren’t you worried about coming home drunk and breaking things?’ or ‘You’re telling me you never accidentally fell into the indoor pool?”
A little known fact about me is that, as a kid, I loved WWE Wrestling. I was deeply obsessed. My first AIM screenname was reymysterio619CB, which is an extremely clunky ode to SmackDown wrestler Rey Mysterio and his signature move ‘the 619’ in which he would run and swing around the rope to kick his opponent in the face. If I remember correctly, this is because I would always play as Mysterio in the accompanying PlayStation video game since I loved his brightly colored mask and matching pants. I have always admired a bold look and coordinated colors!
In retrospect, I attribute my seemingly out-of-character wrestling fandom to two major things:
1) WWE is basically just Soap Operas for Boys. At its core, it’s a serialized drama with ongoing story arcs – heroes and villains, twists and turns. Wrestlemania, the annual championship, is a place to tie up loose story ends and create drama for the next year, not unlike a season finale of Grey’s Anatomy.
2) Professional wrestling is so fucking GAY. I mean this in the best way. It’s grown men, shirtless, wearing makeup and often lathered in oils of sorts, tackling each other into submission. I mean come ON!
So of course I loved going to see Lucha Libre, Mexican professional wrestling that felt more like a spectacle than a sport. I feel like this may be one of those things that some more “cultured” tourists might roll their eyes at but I had the time of my damn life. It was at a HUGE arena full of locals and tourists alike, screaming curse words in every language despite the fact that there were young kids everywhere. Leaning into the homoerotic nature of the sport in front of us, Ryan and I learned how to say “JUST FUCK ALREADY” and “SHOW US YOUR DICK.” Neither of which happened (sad) but it was a thrilling prospect.
Also fun fact: my beloved Rey Mysterio is Mexican and got his start in Lucha Libre (and even kept the trademark mask when he transitioned to American wrestling) so it was a very full circle!! 11 year old Colin, setting his away message on reymysterio619cb to melodramatic Hannah Montana lyrics, would be so proud of me — I’m single and unemployed BUT I did go to wrestling match IRL!
MY BANK HATES ME
My ideal alternative to museums is thrift shopping, despite my already-full suitcases and already-dwindling bank account. In my defense, the CDMX vintage scene is so much cheaper than Brooklyn and full of capital-C, capital-B Colin Burke garments that I couldn’t not buy. I bought so many printed shirts at one store that my bank assumed it was fraud and blocked the purchase but my phone was dead so I couldn’t answer their call and so the store owners gave me beer and mezcal while they charged my phone so I could inform my bank that, fortunately for them and unfortunately for me, that was very much me!
I guess my primary expenses were clothes and food, the nicest spots for both were still cheaper than their New York counterparts.
Coming from Brooklyn, where every bodega sells three at least three different brands of oat milk, my bar for vegan food is unreasonably high. My last day in Alaska, we went to a sandwich shop where I ordered a breakfast sandwich without cheese and without meat and the woman asked me “sorry, do you just want bread then?” After explaining that a sandwich with veggies would be great thank you so much, I got a sandwich with veggies but said veggies were slathered in melted cheese.
Pleased to report that Mexico City is home to some of the best vegan food I’ve ever had in my life. I ate a lot of vegan tacos: some at fancy restaurants, others at street carts where you can order food “for here” and “here” just means a makeshift, wobbly slab of wood on the curb. I also ate amazing vegan nachos, ceviches, pizzas, pastas, nachos, burgers, ramen – all for about ¼ the price of my typical DoorDash orders.
Special shout out to my favorite restaurant LOS LOOSERS, which wasn’t on my initial list of places to go but was recommended by Ryan’s friend’s friend’s friend’s friend – not a grammatical error: Ryan has a friend from college that is in grad school with another girl who has a friend in mexico city who we met for drinks, where he brought his friend who enthusiastically endorsed this place.
All their meats are just different kinds of mushrooms, pulling from a variety of almost 40 different local mushrooms. Their menu had an introductory section explaining the concept that ended with “Eating mushrooms to WIN!” which… so true! The best meal I had in CDMX was their ‘fish taco’ which was so good I went back to have it again.
The best cocktail I had was something called the Bugs Bunny, which was some beautiful concoction of carrot juice and gin and cactus, I think???
I had this at Fifty Mills, the bar within the Four Seasons Mexico City, a hotel I was definitely not staying at and definitely gave that away by asking the server if they could charge my phone while I had a cocktail at 2pm central daylight time.
Runner up for best cocktail (and winner of best cocktail bar) was this speakeasy called Handshake where in order to get in you have to knock on an unmarked door and hope someone hears you. I tried to ask for a table in Spanish but the hostess immediately pulled out her phone and started typing into Google Translate for me which was definite proof that I could not look more American even if I tried. It was at Handshake that I had a mushroom old fashioned (big trip for mushrooms!!!) which was weird but mostly good-weird and Ryan had this amazing matcha vanilla thing that we then recommended to everyone we encountered at the bar.
In my quest to become the most insufferable person alive, I have gotten into natural wine. This is entirely the fault of Farah, my former boss and current unpaid spiritual guide, who talks about low-intervention wines the way I talk about Taylor Swift songs – her eyes LIGHT UP and you think she may be on the verge of tears as she describes her favorite ones. Of course, Farah is extremely cool and was onto CDMX well before everyone else and sent me a Google Maps list with approximately 175 saved locations. Very doable!
After Ryan left (again, grad school is a disease), I had ample time to hit the town, which for me means bringing a book to a bar. Yes, my favorite thing to do while solo travelling is to “manic-pixie-dream-girl” – (verb): to go to a bar alone, read a book while nursing a drink, and look cute and cool enough to invite conversation from others. I’ve found that wine bars are the best place to this because at any other bar, trying to start a conversation with someone based on their drink can feel forced (oh you’re drinking a vodka soda? so funny, I’m drinking the same!) but it’s sort of the name of the game with wine, since most bars have rotating/seasonal menus and their wines by the glass depend entirely on which bottles are already open.
It was in one of these manic pixie dream twink moments that I, after performatively reading one (1) page of my book, ended up in a nearly three hour conversation with a gay fortysomething Argentinian man who was also alone at the bar reading and who looked eerily similar to the guy who hosts that show Hot Ones. (Related: I find that guy so hot and I think it’s mostly because he’s extremely well-prepared for his interviews.)
This guy was a restaurateur, a word so glamorous it’s nearly impossible to spell, who splits his time between the US and Canada and Mexico and he was indeed reading a book about quantum physics. He tried to explain the book to me only for me to keep saying “oh, so it’s like the multiverse?” and describe in detail unrelated plot points from Everything Everywhere All At Once. Anyways, we’re planning an October wedding in Mexico City so be on the lookout for a save-the-date soon!
THAT’S ALL, FOLKS!
I hope I haven’t bored you with this extremely long email. I apologize again for my tardiness but you have to understand that I was late to school almost every single day in high school despite having a five minute door-to-door walk from my house. Take me as I am or leave me!!!
I’ll be back next week to talk Puerto Vallarta and the famous production of Mamma Mia I had the pleasure of seeing PLUS a catch-up on books + music + etc.
Thanks for reading xoxo