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.
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