Despite All My Rage I'm Still Just A Rat In A Cage

I'm ill. I've got the flu.
I've been sort of sick since Monday.
I hadn't slept well.
Yesterday, I came home earlier than usual.
I slept too many hours.

I'm about to get ready to travel to the city.
None of these issues is relevant. 

Last Thursday, a couple of colleagues invited me to give a talk in a Sleep Research Course.

Today, I'm going to talk about how the microbiome impacts on sleep and the development of some neurodegenerative diseasses and neuropsiquiatric disorders.

I had less than one week to prepare this talk.

Originally, I wasn't invited to this course.

The sad events of the last week, changed many things.

I'm sort of nervous.
The talk I prepared it's sort of incomplete... or I think so. 

I'm still ill.

I dreamed about my PhD advisor and his Associate Researcher.

I was in his lab, performing a stereotaxic surgery with one friend of High school.

The surgery was a disaster. I didn't have all the instrumental I needed.
The rat was suffering and my friend constantly told me that he had saved the rat from death, several times. I felt so guilty.

I hold the animal in my hands and I tried to give it comfort. It was really suffering. 

There were another guys in the lab, attending to a seminar.

As I was looking desperately for a heavy drug to give peace to the rat, the Associate Researcher walked close to us. She gave us a speech that, somehow, I had heard before, a few times. She was selling the idea that going to a Neuroscience Meeting was the best idea everyone could ever have. Deep inside, it seemed that this meeting was going to be the most boring thing in the world. She told us her speech so enthusiastically and smiling.

Also she said, in a pretty low voice, as if she didn't want us to hear it, that my advisor was going to be the star on this Neuroscience Meeting. So, in the end, it seemed that the point was that the lucky volunteers would be his slaves. 

She wore a dress with stamped flowers on a black background.
She seemed more honest than she seems in reality.
She didn't use heeled shoes –as she always does in reality– and she seemed shorter than she seems in reality. 

I was so desperately looking for ketamine.
I wanted to give a peaceful death to the rat, but I was so silly and proud of myself that I didn't want to ask her for ketamine.

Then my advisor walked beside me.
He seemed really angst. He had his stereotypical face of "Get out of my way, you useless dumb!" His gesture evoked on me some unpleasant feelings... but, somehow, they were not as intense as they used to be almost ten years ago. At the end of my postgraduate studies I really hated my life and I even developed some level of alcoholism, addiction to smoking and a couple of psychosomatic illnesses. 

These feelings left a pretty clear example on my dream. 
A rat was in agony and my advisor just didn't even know... or didn't care. 

Also, I had the impression that he was so tiny and that I could just beat him up and throw him a few miles away from me, with a pretty small effort.

My dream was an astonishing metaphor. 

Despite All My Rage, I'm Still Just A Rat In A Cage

While The Sun Hangs In The Sky

Last week was a nightmare. 

Around nine o'clock, as I was having a Skype meeting with a couple of colleagues from Mexico City and Juriquilla, Queretaro, in front of my laptop in Lerma de Villada, beginning the 4th week of classes, one of my closest colleagues arrived to his lab, located a few meters away from the University, in Mexico City –a space which he, his wife and my previous boss rented since two years ago, when September 19th's Earthquake damaged the building on which they worked... and on which I worked for the previous three years–, bought an orange juice, left it on a desk and said to his wife that he would go to the bank. 

It would be the last time she would see him.  

At 14: 00, her wife tried to call him on the cellphone –they used to eat together, at that time– and he didn't answer. All day long, she tried to do it, over and over again. 
On Monday's night, she reported him as a missing person.

I knew about the situation, from a friend of my wife, until Tuesday, as I was about to teach my class of Drug Addiction. It was so shocking. He's not the kind of person who disappears, leaving his entire family distraught. 

Immediately, my wife and myself started to share information about him and the situation on our social networks. We were close to them. My wife and myself shared a small office with them for the last two years. 
We saw them everyday... 
Sometimes we ate with them... 

I shared a bigger office with both of them on the previous three years. 
I worked with them for the last five years. 

We even have a publish paper and another one that I'm writing. 

I saw them when they told me that she was pregnant and I saw them when they took her baby daughter to the University when the baby started to walk and to go to the kindergarten... 

I saw their entire family when they took them to the University, when they were on holidays... 

Both of them invited me to teach a few classes and seminars for their undergraduate and postgraduate students... He, a researcher from Oregon and myself shared the advisory of a postgraduate student... 

At the end of each year, since we started to work together, my wife and myself went to their house for the last dinner of the year. My wife even cooked a few deserts they loved. 

They sometimes gave us a ride on their Van, if we accidentally saw them on an Avenue next to the University, on which they passed right after leaving their baby daughter in the kindergarten. They even asked us if we wanted the baby tub of their baby daughter, when we told them that we wanted to have a baby. 

I was beside him during the Earthquake... on the third floor of the soon-to-be-damaged building... and I saw them so preoccupied –his wife was in another building of the University and their daughters were at their schools, a few miles away– and I saw them helping a couple of women whom had lost their minds, as soon as the Earthquake finished...

On Wednesday's night, we knew via Whatsapp that he had been found in a small town in Oaxaca. The message was brief and sad: it said it weren't good news. 

On Thursday's morning it was official: he was dead. 

The circumstances of his death are suspicious.
The authorities seem to have an urge to close the case as soon as possible.

They say he commited suicide. It is unreal. 
A few of his colleagues –including me– have a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology. 
We don't think so.
He was the most positive person I have ever knew. 
He had five kids. The younger of them has four years old.  

His pupils say that on the previous days of his missing, he was so optimistic. 

Finally, after two years, the authorities of the University had told him that, at the end of October, he and her wife will have a new lab... inside the University... and so they will have an appropriate space to continue with their experimental research... and so they will not longer have to pay a rent, with their own money, for a space a few blocks away from the University... 

His pupils say that he and his wife were making plans to celebrate it with a big travel in boat across the ocean. 

No one around him, agrees with this suicidal hypothesis. 
Some journalists have spread the new that his family accepted that he was depressed. 
None of this is true. 

I still can't believe it. 
I can't believe I will not see him ever again.

The last time I saw him was on July.
It was the quarterly progress examination of a postgraduate student. 

As usual, he hugged me and he seemed pretty happy. 

At the end of the exam, we walked downstairs.

He gave me the cellphone number of one of his friends.
His friend was looking for a younger researcher. She was able to interview some candidates in order to contract one of them. He thought I could be interested. I was the third person he told about it. I got a new job on January. The other two persons are still postdocs. 

He started to smoke.
I wanted to ask him which were his thoughts about the last strike on the University.

On April, I saw him and I saw his wife at some protests against the three month strike.
(I even uploaded a couple of videos of these protests on my YouTube Channel.)
It was such a disturbing situation that we didn't talk at all. I had no money. I had to spend all my savings to survive. I had no patience to talk to anyone. 

Back then, on July, I wanted to ask him which were his thoughts about unionized professors... but we spoke very few. He had to see someone else. 

Then, I went to the office we shared for the last two years –since we lost our building–, to say Hi to her wife. She was really warm and she was really happy to see me. I knew things weren't cool at all, at the office. 
It seemed that she and his husband had been threatened by members of the new administration –those who had left them without a workspace since the Earthquake of 2017– and she wasn't happy at all. It was weird. She's one of the most passionate scientist I have ever met. 

These guys of the new administration seemed to have an urge to occupy the office, no matter if it wasn't their office and no matter if my colleagues saw it as a temporary asylum... because the new administration had not assigned them an appropriate space. 
It seemed more important to them to have the office rather than to give to my colleagues a decent space to continue with their experimental research. 

I tried to distract her and I asked her for her advice.
I' was about to become an Editor in a Neuroscience Topic in an Open Access Journal, and she was Editor of this Journal a few years ago. 

We said Goodbye. 

On this awful weekend I sent her a couple of messages. 
She didn't give an answer. I understand her. She said –no doubt about it– there were the worst days of her life.

Last Friday, it was the funeral of his husband.

At the main entrance of the room, it was a photograph of the seven members of the family.
Later, she said to her father in law that they took that photograph on December, a couple of years ago. 

It was so heartbreaking. His husband looked so happy and smiled, as we, who knew him, saw him daily. 

When I saw her widow, we hugged and I was unable to say something smart. 
She told me that she thought that she wouldn't find her husband's body... and that it gave her some peace of mind. 

I was unable to say something. I didn't find the appropriate words to give her comfort.

My wife and myself were in the funeral until the next day. 
We spoke with colleagues and pupils. 

I feel terrible. I'm still on shock. 
I would like to help her widow somehow, but I dunno what to do or to say. 

I met her when I was about to start my postgraduate studies, more than ten years ago. 
Then she was about to obtain her PhD degree. She's about my age. 
We were professors at the School of Psychology. 
Sometimes we saw each other and spoke a few words. 

I cannot stop thinking of them. 
We shared so many memories. It's awful and painful.
I remember both of them being the most pacifist and friendly persons I have ever met. 

Since I knew of his death, I've been thinking on this song. 

In one of our last conversations on Monday, almost a year ago, he confessed that he was a big fan of Queen. One day after,I just had seen the movie of Freddie Mercury and I told him so.

He asked me if the movie had sexual or violent or inappropriate scenes... so he can get his four old year-daughter to see it to the movie theatre... 

I never knew if he watched it.
I will remember him as the enthusiastic and smiling guy he was.  

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Innuendo