The Screen Is Us And We're TV

I was a poser and a confused teenager when I started to study Psychology. 
I was seventeen years old. I had low self esteem. 
My face was full of acne. 

I always knew that I would study at Ciudad Universitaria.
It was a big deal. It was so scary. 
Excluding my dad, no one in my entire family –grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins– had made it to College. 
My family expected me to become a neurosurgeon. 

(What a hell! I wanted to be a writer!)

I used to live with a great level of conformity. 
My parents gave me everything I needed. 
I didn't have to get a job to buy books or compact discs. 
Since I didn't care about clothing nor parties, I really didn't need more money than I got. 

I was focused on my own interests. 
I didn't have friends and I didn't want to make friends. 
I was so selective and I had found many defects on the guys I saw on a daily basis. 

I didn't have responsabilities at all. 
Everything I did was reading, writing and listening music. 
Music was all for me. 
I was so crazy for Nirvana.
I wanted to play songs like Kurt Cobain. 
I got obsessed with him.
In a couple of years –since I knew of his music–, I became an expert on his life. 

In Junior High School, I was some sort of dork with the best grades. 
I even had a scholarship and I even got diplomas and I even was the one who gave the orders in the shooting guard. 

In High School, I got sick from being a good student and I started to skip classes. 
I started to leave my hair grow and I dressed like a homeless.

No matter what I stopped doing, I never had bad grades.
The worst thing I experienced was to be seen by some schoolmates as a dumb regular student.  
The scariest thing I experienced was that a corrupt teacher wanted me to buy him a device for his CPU. According to him, all my examinations were a disaster and he was "giving me an opportunity" to get rid of them. Nonetheless, he never showed me the examinations. 

I got so angst. 
I told my dad and we had a meeting with the principal. 
At the end, this teacher had a long story of corruption and he was fired.

(I wonder what kind of dirty business he's been up to.)

I also fantasized with women I liked. 

Dunno why, but I always had a crush on older girls.

They we're the opposite to me: they were good looking, they seemed to be more mature than me... and they had many friends. 
Dunno why, but they always preferred pop music rather than rock n' roll music (whatever it means). 

I wrote them poems and songs and stories in which we were so close together.

  
A couple of months before College, I was scared to hell. 
I didn't want to leave my conformity. 
I wanted to keep myself hidden in my bedroom.

I knew Ciudad Universitaria from my childhood. 
One of my aunts worked at La Biblioteca Central and she and my uncle sometimes took my cousins to visit the campus. A few times I accompanied them.  

Nonetheless, the first day of classes Ciudad Universitaria I was so impressed. 
Still remember the darkness of the road from home to school. 
I woke up at 5: 00 am and got to the school before 7: 00 am.
I took the Metro. Linea 3 was almost new. 

Ciudad Universitaria, really seemed a city. It was full of academic buildings.
It was full of students. It was full of academic life.  

On my first semester of classes, I had classes at 7: 00 am on a daily basis. 
I got to the University so early that I had enough time to walk from Copilco Metro Station to the School of Psychology and arrived fifteen minutes earlier to my firsts classes. 

Except by one, in all of my first classes, I had a lot of free time. 
Our teachers got to the classroom almost at 7: 40 am. 
We all employed this free time to meet us. 

At the beginning I refused to do it, but the classroom was full of pretty girls. 
They looked like the ones I had always fantasized with in High School. 
Soon, it became so obvious that I couldn't ignore them. 

These girls even had a particular way of speaking and pronouncing words. 
They had studied on private schools... they wanted to become therapists... on the previous summer holidays they had gone to Europe... her boyfriends were physicians, or they were entrepreneurs...

Things like that. My schoolmates we're strange creatures for me. 
One guy was always sleepy. 
He acted like a rockstar. He played on a band. 
When he got involved with the classroom, he told us that his band had recently recorded a music video and that one of the members of Café Tacuba had gave him a guitar. 

We spoke a few words. He liked Smashing Pumpkins. 
On the lasts semesters of Bachelor's Degree, he changed absolutely. 
He acted like a hipster.  
He acted like if we had never spoken. 

(Wonder what kind of academic work he's been up to.
Would he became a music producer of silly bands?) 

I met a guy. 
He liked, more or less, the bands I liked.
We immediately became some sort of friends. 
He lent me his copy of Antichrist Superstar. 

(Maybe I just bought a cassette and so he recorded me a copy of the album on it). 

From the beginning, I loved the album. 
The music was so aggressive. 
The lyrics were so violent, so cryptic and well written. 

They talked about the Bible, the Apocalypse and the Antichrist's arrival. 
Marilyn Manson was the main character.
His lyrics were so smart and made me think of my own life. 
Each song had a phrase or a chorus that repeated on another song. 
They were really rad and smart thoughts. 

For months I listened up to this album.

Today is a cloudy day –like the dark and cold first days of College– and I feel the same way I felt on my first days as an undergraduate student.  
I've been listening to this album on the last days. 
At 3 in the morning, I woke up from nightmares. 
Apparently, Marilyn Manson makes me sick.  

June 19th, 1990

I was nine years old.

Back then my mother worked until 14: 00 p.m., we had some extra classes and we got out from school at the same time, so my grandpa picked us up in Elementary School. 

He got on his black bike. 

My brother sat in front of grandpa, in the crossbar of the bike, in some sort of improvised seat adapted to it, and I sat behind grandpa, in the backseat of the bike. 
Sometimes we changed places. 

He took us home. 
Ridings were fun.
He was so skilled and he drove fast.
I still can remember the wind upon my face.  

He never lost the balance of the bike and we never fell... or, at last, I don't remember it happened.  

Grandpa also had a motorcycle. 

He had worked several years at the Post Office –according to my mom, he saw terrible things, like lots of stacked corpses in a Government Building short after the killing of students at La Plaza de Las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco in 1968– and I think he had just recently retired, so sometimes he kind of forgot that we were just a couple of kids and that he was driving a bike. 

Due to grandpa's skilled driving, once my brother lost a few notebooks on our way home 'cause his bag opened when he sat in the backseat of the bike and grandpa drove fast as hell and no one noticed it until we got home.  

It was fun. 

They were the last days of Elementary School for me. 

In the school there was a World Cup fever. 

I had even recently won a Soccer Tournament with the less athletic boys of my class. 
I was the Captain of my team and my ex-best friend was the Captain of the other team. 
Don't know why we weren't friends anymore, but I do remember that he picked up all the athletic and stronger and taller boys of the class for his team and so I had to made my team with the rest of the class.  

In the Tournament, as expected, we started losing all the games, but I decided to become the goalkeeper and, though the team didn't have the best striker, we made it to the Final Match and won it. 

On June 19th, 1990, grandpa took us home as usual. 

Then we lived in an apartment. The apartment was small, but it had a great view. 
From the window next to my bed I could see the volcanoes Iztaccíhualt and Popocatépetl.
It was a rad view.  

We lived in the fifth floor, so I guess grandpa left us on the main entrance of the building and my brother and I just climbed the stairs as grandpa rode his black bike back to his house.

As soon as I got rid off my school uniform, I turned on the big squared black and white TV we had in our room. 

The cartoon channel had been usurped by the World Cup. 
In Rome, there were playing the national teams of Italy and Czechoslovakia. 

I sat on an old sofa bed in front of the TV. 

A few minutes later, Roberto Baggio received the Etrusco ball in the midfield –the match ball was a beautie– next to one of the border lines. 

It seemed an irrelevant play. 
There were no chances for him to score from that position. 

He gave the ball to another Italian player and then the Italian player returned the Etrusco to him. Then Baggio drove the ball fast. He was so skilled dodging rivals. He left behind four rivals or so. One of them even tried to take away the ball from him, sweeping at his feet. 

Baggio was so skilled and vertiginous that he seemed a player of another planet. 

In a few seconds he arrived to the rival's area. 

He dodged another players without losing the ball and made some sort of hip movement with which he left behind the last defender. With his hip movement, he even fooled the goalkeeper. 

He kicked the ball and scored.  
The crowd went crazy. 
It was a rad goal. 

This is one of the reasons why I started to watch World Cups. 
It had been elapsed almost thirty years. 

My Strange Addiction

17 6

I haven't drank at all, but I am so freakin' drunk

I haven't spoken for a while, but my voice's so tired of singing

I can't believe she's so freakin' thin

I can't stop thinking about her skinny naked body

I am so ill and I should kill these thoughts

I shall bury them inside my dreams

Pupils are incredibly wide open

Reading mysterious messages on twitter 

I suppose we're playing, but she's blind to my touch

I am kind of excited by her voice

I guess she likes to dance

I guess she likes to see herself in the mirror

I guess she watches her skinny naked body

In the mirror

Like I do when I have this dream

In which we play on twitter 

I Want To Do Something That Matters

Yesterday, I woke up at 5: 30 am.

I took a shower, I got dressed, I had breakfast, I came to the University to teach a class at 8: 00 am. It was cold and I just had a thin sweater. 

I spoke about resilience, about a couple of soccer players who grew up in pretty different environments and became so important to their countries –one of them won an U-17 World Cup and played with Ronaldinho and Messi in Barcelona; the other one was a victim of the War of the Balkans, won the most important award a soccer player can receive in Europe and the last year led his national team to the final match of the World Cup– and that, currently, are on very distinct situations.

One of my pupils asked if adversity is a necessary condition for resilience. 
A couple of students spoke and clarified the point. 
I didn't know they were so informed about this topic.
It was a nice surprise. 

I spoke about a couple of books of war and about aggression and violence in modern society.
I wanted to be clear: Thomas Hobbes wasn't wrong at all. 

We (human beings) are violent. Despite we don't own letal weapons, we're able to create letal weapons. In comparison to another animals, we don't have a biological restriction to kill another human and so we kill another humans just for pleasure or just to steal something that the other human owns and that we desire so badly.

I spoke about plagiarism and social networks and the dilemma nature versus nurture. 

It was a class of History of Psychology. 
We're reviewing British empiricists and nativists such as Descartes and Leibniz.

Before the class, I read a few pages of a few books and papers I have on stand by, I qualified some examinations of Statistics and I wrote some notes for another class.

At 11: 00 am I left the office and moved to an appointment. 
My boss and I had an academic meeting at Mexico City. 

We took the University transportation –it was a black Jeep with polarized glasses, very new and comfortable– at 11: 40 am and we moved to the Instituto Nacional de Neurología y Neurocirugía. 

We have an academic collaboration with a couple of researchers in there. 
They own a San Diego Instruments' apparatus that we need so bad. 

We had this meeting at 13: 15 pm. 
It lasted an hour, or so. 
They even spoke about politics and the bad things scientists of the institute are dealing with due to this new government. 

I particularly didn't like the meeting at all.
I felt these researchers were sort of arrogant and that they saw me as a PhD student with just one paper and no experience at all. 
It's really though.
You just can't speak about all the things you have done... when you first meet someone. 
You need to be patient. 
Sooner or later, things will fall apart. 

If they knew half of the things I've done –exclusively regarding my academic career–, maybe, they would change their attitude. Maybe they would be the same.  
Though I'm not pretty sure if I want to be recognized by them, it's annoying. 
It sucks. It's a pretty common issue on academy. 
You have to deal with someone else's ego all the time.
It's obvious why people see us as a team of cocky and hurtful guys.  

Then we moved to the other point of the city, to UAM-Xochimilco. 

At 15: 30 pm, my boss had another appointment there. 

After his meeting, he introduced me to the responsible of the bioterium.
She reminded me so bad to someone I have recently met. 
They basically spoke of another issue I have to deal with. 
We have another collaboration with researchers of UAM-Xochimilco.
We have a prenatal immune activation model with rodents. 

They also spoke about the bad things scientists of UAM –including myself– are dealing with due to this new government. 
It seems that each time I'm finally about to get an academic tenure track position, things fall apart. (Should I devote myself to another activity?) 

As my boss went to his appointment, I walked around the University.
It's awesome. It's really an enormous University. 
I understood why it is so desired by academic mobs. 
On the last strike, UAM–Xochimilco was a big issue.
Everyone seemed to be interested on employing it as a weapon of power. 
I even found a building that has appeared in many of my dreams. 
It was the first time I ever saw it. 

This meeting lasted half an hour and my boss had told me that it would last an hour and a half. 
As soon as this meeting ended, he called me on the phone, but my phone had no battery, so I arrived at 16: 45 pm. 

We moved to Lerma again.

Our driver took the Second Floor of Periférico. 
It was my first time, too. 
The city looked fantastic. 
It even looked like another city of another country.

We arrived to Lerma at 18: 00 pm.
I arrived home at 19: 00 pm.
I'm still so tired. 
I still don't get used to this rhythm. 
I want to do something that matters.
I need to write a lot more.  

I Want To Do Something That Matters