I wanna fly, I wanna ride with you

Veronica was already your associate when I met you. I barely remember when I met her, but I suppose that the first time I saw her, she was performing stereotactic surgery, she was standing on a stool, she couldn't have been much taller than me, less than five feet six inches. Underneath her lab coat, I kinda saw a tight blouse and a skirt and I couldn't stop looking at her legs, they were so awesome. It looked like she went out for a run frequently. She was also sort of angry, I believe I said «Hello» and that she didn't even say «Hi». Maybe she just faked a smile.

Then, on my first New Year's dinner with your research group, she got drunk. Too much wine. They said she did the same, year after year. She was so drunk that started to say some things out of context. At one point, she told me «I will teach you things you don't even know...», and she was not talking about any experiment we were collaborating in. Veronica continued: «You're gonna like it...», or something like that. They said she used to get drunk in every occasion she could. 

I wish this weren't true but meeting you was so traumatic, your lab was hell, I still dream of you. I traveled to the future and today it is not May 20, 2022 but March 13, 2025 and I just woke up from a recurrent dream, I'm coughing, beating on the MacBook keyboard, and I wish this was another dream or nightmare, but in my dream I was again at your lab, feeling mad and dizzy. It was the middle of the night, we were in some sort of meeting with students and I was afraid and angst, I didn't want to see you, I didn't want to be in hell. You wore yellow or khaki pants and also a ridiculous shirt and tie. But you also wanted me to work for you. You looked at me with that overacted face of anger and discomfort. 

Suddenly we were in your office, but it was a different office, not the one I knew, everything was upside down in hell. You ordered «You just need to do what I ask you to do, Marcel», and then I laughed and I told you «You really think I am an idiot, a guy who just follows instructions!», and you sort of started to got up from your seat –I was standing close to you– and it looked like we were about to fight, when Veronica appeared out of nowhere –it was the middle of the night–, and she was still your associate and she was wearing nothing but her lab coat, her tight blouse and her skirt, like she did the first time I saw her in hell. And I couldn't stop looking at her legs, and she was so close to me I could touch her. 

She stood between the two and smiled and looked at me. Her look calmed me, it made my blood stop boiling. Then she put her hand on my shoulder and somehow I knew I was dreaming and I could do whatever I wanted, and I wanted to touch her legs, but I just walked out from your lab. 

Outside, it was already dawning.

Now I'm sober and sad –life's so unfair!–, and I think of Veronica and her legs. I wonder why I dreamed of her, why I am still dreaming of you, I haven't been in your lab for a decade but I still dream of your lab that was hell, then I listen this song of Queens of the Stone Age, and I cough again and I am still beating the MacBook keyboard and it hurts –life's so unfair! And I don't remember exactly when but the image burns in my mind: I got drunk in the apartment where I lived when I was in hell, it must have been any Friday afternoon in 2013, and then I heard this song and couldn't stop thinking of Veronica's legs.

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

If You're Lonely, You Can Talk To Me

I would like to write, but I feel so tired.
I'm on my new house.
It's weird 'cause we had always lived in apartments. 

My wife and cats are sleeping. 
They're so happy. 

A week ago we moved from Mexico City.
Lerma is a nice place, but cold. 

I'm still sick, though not as I sick as I was a week ago. 
The moving was so exhausting. 
Excluding the furnishing, we moved 120 boxes!

I had a lot of stuff. 
Tons of books, tons of CDs, tons of DVDs, tons of BRs and tons of clothes, five guitars, five guitar pedals, microphones, personal computers, a couple of amplifiers for the guitars... 

My new studio isn't bad at all, but currently it looks like a warehouse.  

We lived in a small apartment the last five years. 
It was a nice apartment, but our neighbors were so disrespectful. 
Usually they put loud music -always the same song- and they kept the building so dirty. 
They made loud parties almost once per month.
They usually threw trash to the streets and behaved as if having kids and cars were the most ambitious goals humankind could ever have. 
Some of them even murdered dogs and cats. 

Nevertheless, I feel nostalgic. 

Last Sunday of the previous year, we went to the old apartment. 
It was so weird to look at it so empty and cold. 
We lived many things there. 

Before we lived in this small apartment, we lived in another one. 
It was located in a better neighborhood than the later one. 
It was so well located and people was so polite. 
We had a nice park, coffee shops and restaurants so close. 

Sadly, then I was so focused on my PhD that I didn't enjoy it at all.

Before I got this job in Lerma, I was a postdoc at UAM Iztapalapa for four years.

It was a nice period of my life. 
I was free to do whatever I wanted to.
My boss was an awesome man.  

He helped me out to find a new job. 
The last six months I wanted to speak with him. 
For a year I had been some sort of consultant and I wanted to have a better academic position. I wasn't enjoying at all to be some sort of consultant. 

Money was running out. 
For a year, almost everything I had was from SNI. 

I met my most recent boss when I was about to have my admission interview to the PhD. 
It must be the autumn of 2008. I needed that he signed me a document.
He was in the middle of a Science Fair. 
Though he didn't know me, he was so polite. 

A year ago or so, he came to the Dissemination of Science's Office in which I had been working for the last year -the team in which I was working, had been working in an enormous building who had to be abandoned after the September 19th Mexico City' earthquake- and he stayed with me for a couple of hours.

For a reason I ignore, he knew that I play guitar. 
(Maybe someone told him so, or he looked at one of my youtube videos.)

He told me that, at some point -maybe when he was a postdoc-, he wanted to play guitar, too. He told me that he was a terrible guitarist. He spoke me about a Beatles' song.

Dunno remember exactly what he said, but the point was that according to him, this song has been considered to have one of the best bass lines in the history of rock n' roll. 

For the ten years I have been meeting him, this has been the most personal moment we ever had.

I was speechless. It was so weird. What a jerk I was. 

The first night I slept in my new house, I had a dream about my recent boss and one of his friends who also was my boss when I was a postgraduate student. 

Once I recover I will write about it. 

Hey Bulldog

Now My Mind Must Go On Holiday

Six years ago, I was about to have my first published paper as a first author. 

Even though I was so enthusiastic for what it meant for me, if I think about it, I really did not enjoy my life at all. 

I was so stressed and focused on my research project, working for a minimum of ten hours, almost on a daily basis, that I got drunk on weekends to deal with stress. 

I smoked tobacco and ate unhealthy food. 
The only physical activity I practiced was to play soccer on Saturdays.  

I demanded too much from my heart.

At the lab, I attended to seminars each Monday. 
They were divided in two categories. 
On the morning, we had a Journal Club. 
The second was meant to be a progress seminar and it started at lunch time and ended almost at 9:00 p.m.

At that time, they were several lazy and irresponsible students in the lab.
Frequently, they did not appear on Mondays and they did not perform experiments. They pissed off my advisor and the seminars became a nightmare.

No matter what, these seminars were never suspended -except for a couple weeks on summer and Christmas holidays. 

Outside the lab, I attended to seminars each Wednesday. 

They were organized on a Clinical of Addictive Disorders and they were basically for physicians, psychologists and therapists.
These seminars were taught in the same way students teach a class, when they have to expose: thousands of slides with statements that everybody could read.   

They were mainly a waste of time. 

I was also an asignature professor at the School of Psychology, four to six hours per week. 

As a PhD student, I attended to a class which I really thought it was a waste of time.
Also, I performed experiments, sleep recordings, stereotaxic surgeries, statistical analyses and things like that.

Six years ago, Mark Lanegan came to Mexico City.
He and his band were touring Blues Funeral and they gave a show on April 9th, 2012. 

Though I knew a little bit Mark Lanegan's solo career, I would have loved to go to his show.

I had heard several albums of Screaming Trees.
I believe that I just had bought Blues Funeral. 
I missed his show. 

I was so focused on my research project, that I heard about Mark Lanegan's show almost a year later, when Soundgarden came to Mexico City for the first time. 

I felt so stupid. 

Now, I have several papers as first author and things have changed a lot.

A few days earlier, it was accepted my first paper as corresponding author.

Through the revision process, referees made appropriate comments that improved the quality of the manuscript.

Referees did not criticize the English, not even suggested to change a single word.

Simultaneously, it is so satisfying and frustrating.

To be a corresponding author means a lot on my field.
To be Spanish-native and to be able to write by yourself your first corresponding author paper in English should mean a lot, too.

Even though it is supposed that it is a basic skill among Spanish-native researchers (science is English-written), it is not as common as it should be.

Sadly, no one of my current colleagues knows that I have written all the papers that I have published so far as a first author.

(Blame it on my advisor.)

I don't even know if my current colleagues know that I had four papers as first author when I started to work with them.

It's pretty normal, but it's so frustrating.

I must start from scratch, as if in my previous papers, I could barely write in English.
This is so damn irritating.

(Well, in a way, this blog supports my point).

Now, I enjoy my life more than I did six years ago.

Anna Hanks from Austin, Texas, USA (16 March 2011, 14:35)

I have a lot of free time.

I employ it for writing personal stuff.
I even finished a novel with which I participated on Premio Mauricio Achar 2018.

I employ it for reading several pieces of information, literature and music.
I write about these things on my blogs.

I employ my free time for playing electric guitar.
I have three guitars -a Squier Stratocaster, a Gibson SG and another cheaper one-, and I also bought a couple of amplifiers, microphones and several guitar pedals.

I play songs I like -I never learn a song just because- and I even have composed some silly songs. I don't know if someday I will have the opportunity to record them.

I employ my free time for listening music.
That's how I discovered several artists I hadn't heard, like Kurt Vile, Courtney Barnett, Cloud Nothings...

(I have a small fortune on books, CDs, cassettes and vinyls.
I could have bought a car, instead of having these small treasures).

Nowadays, I barely drink alcohol or eat unhealthy food.

I quit smoking three years ago, I had surgery two years ago...

And Mark Lanegan came back to give a show.

Unlike six years ago, I know a lot more his solo career.

Among several of his songs and collaborations, I have heard The Winding Sheet, Bubblegum, Blues Funeral and Gargoyle...

After the show, I even shook hands with him and I got he signed me a copy of Uncle Anesthesia.

This time he was accompanied by Shelley Brien on keyboards and Jeff Fielder on guitar. They were touring Gargoyle, his tenth LP and fourth in five years.

(It was an awesome show.
Eventually, when I feel less darker and negative, I will post about it.)

No matter what, sometimes I still feel invisible, like I did six years ago.

Now My Mind Must Go on Holiday

My Heart Is Broke, But I Have Some Glue

When people think about to travel to the future, it is likely that they think about money. 

It is likely that they think to buy a Sports Almanac, just like Marty McFly did. 

In my case, I will travel to the future and I will return without money and even more disappointed than I was at the beginning.

When I originally published this post, I was about to have a job interview via Skype.   

It was an opportunity to work in a private foreign University. 

They looked for a psychologist with experience in teaching.

It was even better if the candidate also had experience in research. 

It was my profile, which is rare. 

80% of opportunity jobs in my research field are devoted to specialists on sophisticated techniques of molecular biology and they don't even consider behavior as a relevant issue.

A lot of these opportunities employ specialists on these techniques as workforce, and are focused on the study of plants and microorganisms.  

The main point of this type of research is to produce valuable food and to increase the exportation and the sales of these products.

As the interview approached, I was even more nervous. 

I was supposedly watching a soccer game on TV.

Nigeria and Iceland played at the Volgograd Arena. 

Even though I enjoy World Cup -I have watched all of them since USA '94-, I couldn't stop thinking about the interview. 

What if I started to behave as an idiot?

What if I started to sweat like crazy?

What if I started to stutter? 

What if I suffered a blackout? 

What if the interviewer was a neurotic?

I have always been better doing what I do, rather than selling what I do. 

I am a researcher, not a salesman!

(In any case, what I sell is research when I write original papers or when I write research projects).  

The interview was more friendly than I expected. 

The interviewer was a young girl and she was too polite. 

At the end, the job offer was a really good one. 

I felt pretty fine. 

The salary was awesome.

They gave you benefits, they paid you vacations once a year... 

All I had to do was to do the same activity I've been doing for the last ten years almost for free. It really sounded like fun. 

For the entire day, I was thinking about it.

Didn't I deserve a job like that?

Of course. 

I became SNI shortly after I ended my PhD. 

I have experience in teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels. 

Thought this job would be the opportunity I had always been waiting for. 

I was so enthusiastic, making plans with my wife. 

All I ever wanted was to have enough money to buy my own house.

Raising a baby and doing it in the best environment and with the greatest comforts. 

As I re-write this post, I feel so miserable. 

On July 17th, I received an e-mail from the interviewer. 

While it happened, I was answering the comments the reviewers had made to my last original paper as a first author. 

We employed a postnatal overnutrition murine model to explore the role of an orexigenic system from the lateral hypothalamus. 

On the last decade, this system has been studied on genetically obese models. 

One of the reviewers was particularly strict. She even asked us to re-analyzed the entire data. The paper includes behavioral, pharmacological and Western Blot data. 

I saw the e-mail notification and my heart started to beat like a war drum. 

I finished the comment I was working on and checked my e-mail. 

It seems that rejection is inherent to my life.

I fail over and over again. 

The most common phrase I have ever read is

"We're sorry to inform you..."

(How many times have I read this phrase?)

I am pretty used to bad news. 

I am kind of tired. 

Maybe I should have learned how to fix cellphones or cars. 

What I like to do is barely attractive to the society. 

Once I assimilated the notice, I e-mailed the interviewer.

I just wanted to know why did they had just decided that I was not the best candidate.

She insinuated to me that her boss decided to hire someone else, from the same University. 

At the last hour, her boss apparently decided to change the profile they were looking for. 

I am a lucky guy in love, but a disaster to get a real good job. 

For years I've been working just because I like what I do. 

For years I've been working for free on holidays and weekends.

(For years I've been dealing with people which think I am a loser because I don't have a car.)

You could say that most people are like that, but you don't know that I form part of less than 1% of the economically active population in my country.

(I am pretty sure that you don't even noticed that Spanish is my native language.)

I will write on this post about my experiences with job interviews. 

I'm about to have one and I'm so nervous!

This opportunity would completely change my life and I want it so badly to happen. 

Also I would like to write about all the kind of jobs I've had.  

Maybe the post will focus on a girl I met when I worked in a hotel. 

Or maybe on a German girl I met when I wanted to work as tourist guide in Playa del Carmen.

My Heart Is Broke, But I Have Some Glue

Must Be The Smoke From My Lungs

Yesterday, we ate together and I sat beside her.

Before the food was served, she started to speak about an experiment related to analgesia and thalidomide. 

As she spoke, I couldn't stop looking at her. 
From my point of view -I was so close to her and looking at her left side-, she was so gorgeous. 

She looked like a smart and beautiful woman. 

As she spoke, her lips moved along in a very seductive way. Wondered how would it be to kiss them, when I remembered the first time I saw her. 

I had been a postgraduate student for a few months, and that day I went to eat with some of my labmates to a small restaurant. All of them were about to finish their postgraduate studies. 

That restaurant was their favorite place to eat. The waitresses were pretty and nice and they had amazing memories. They never wrote what we ordered and they never got wrong. Food and price were nice, too. 

And there she was... 

Immediately, I felt attracted and somehow weak. 
My legs started to shake and my heart beat started to accelerate.  
I was like an adolescent falling in love with a TV actress. 

She smiled and then I realized she had brackets. They drove me wild. 

Also, as she smiled, she looked sort of innocent and childish, but beautiful. 

She spoke a few times. She was kind of shy. 

As my labmates, she was about to finish her postgraduate studies. 
She was in that small restaurant with another woman who was friend with my labmates. 

Apparently, they used to eat together once in a while. 

I was about to get married and I felt so ridiculous for having those thoughts, but kept thinking of her the entire day.

I just knew her name. 

Before we ate, we had not seen each other for several years. 

Now, she's married, too. She even has a son. 
I had even forgotten that I was attracted to her.

  
While the food was about to get served, I had to stop looking at her.
Her beauty was really hypnotic. I was afraid to start drooling. 

Then, I looked at her hands. They were so white and tiny. Each one of her fingernails had varnish residues -a mixture of carmine and magenta-, and they made me think that she wasn't really worried at all about her appearance. It gave me the chills. 
Wondered how would it be to touch those hands. 

I'm just attracted in a literary way to her. 

Clean Up Before She Comes
   

Ella Se Quedó Sin Boda Ni Arroz

Short before I received my PhD, my wife and I had to move from the apartment where we used to live. It was a small place, but it was located in a nice neighborhood. People was nice and respectful. They never had noisy parties late at night. They didn't listen up awful music at a very high volume. They didn't mistreat pets. 

We had to move to a cheaper place 'cause our homemade was about to increase the rental and we wouldn't have enough money to pay it. My scholarship was about to finish, and we didn't want to acquire debts. Even when my advisor believed that I was not a truly productive guy -not to mention that he was convinced that I didn't have my own ideas-, all I wanted to do was to publish more papers than I needed it to get my degree, and so I ran out of time. I could focus on the writing of my doctoral thesis to obtain my degree as soon as possible, but I wanted to have more papers as first author. 

(So far, I'm the only one of his graduates with the record of more papers published as first author -as a student, obviously-, in his lab).

Fortunately, my wife also had a job -then she worked in a maritime import and export company- and we survived for almost a year with our savings and her money. 

From that time, when we moved here, I had to put up with my advisor and his crazy mood changes for almost half a year more. 

He wanted me to stay in the lab endlessly, with a ridiculous salary. 

It wasn't even the third part of the rental I had to pay month after month. 

We moved in here, on August, 2013. 

This apartment is located in a cheap neighborhood, just a miles away from the airport and one of the biggest avenues of the city. You can hear the planes crossing the sky all the time. 
You are immerse in the horrendous city traffic all the time.

We live in the 5th floor. Since there are many factories near the building, heavy trucks circulate along the avenue all the time. When this happens, the building moves and it feels like if you were in the middle of a slight earthquake. 

Sadly, you get used to all these issues. 

Also, people is noisy and disrespectful in this neighborhood. They have noisy parties and they force you to listen to their loud music all the time. The rule seems to be that "adults" have at least a couple of kids, at least one car and at least one pet. The rule seems to be that they throw the trash in the street and that they mistreat all human beings. They behave like if the most important thing in the world was to reproduce and to have a car. 

My wife got the apartment for us. She knew someone who used to live in this building. 
One of my wife's friends is the owner. 

Due to the terrible stress I had to deal with in the lab for almost my entire postgraduate studies -my advisor seemed to be a very gentle and a nice guy, but when I published my first paper he became aggressive and tried to humiliate me as much as he could-, I started to use drugs. 

For almost three years, I used to smoke pot and tobacco and to drink alcohol, desperately.
I needed a maintenance dose of everything.

I used drugs in such an awful way, that I ended up with health problems. 

Apart from that health issues, several times I developed psychosomatic dermatitis and I was about to have a nervous breakdown. 

When my wife and I moved to this apartment, I was almost an alcoholic. 
I drank and smoked on a daily basis, to the point I couldn't stop nor do anything else if I hadn't drank or smoked. I was tired and depressed all the time. I had some sort of purple haze within my brain, like that Jimmy Hendrix' song. 

   
A few months after we arrived to this apartment, the owner of the apartment moved with us. 
She lived with us for almost half a year. She's younger than my wife -she's the youngest of her friends- and she had a very close relationship to her parents. 

She needed a place to live in 'cause her parents had moved away from the city and she just had been accepted to study in the School of Medicine. It was her second career. 

All my life I have been a lonely guy and drug abuse had strengthened my need to be alone. 
So, when that woman moved to live with us, it was a truly complicated situation to me.

(It was so complicated, that I couldn't even write in the entire period she lived with us. Not a single story, nor anything else. I even left my blogs). 

Almost on a daily basis, her parents visit her in the apartment. 

Sometimes, they even came to the apartment with her sister and her small son. Everyday was like a cozy Sunday breakfast. 

The worst of all was that they -the entire family- never warned us -not to my wife, not to me- that they would go to the apartment. They simply did as they pleased. 

I couldn't stop thinking that they just didn't care about me. I felt that I was invisible and that my opinion was useless, but -as it happened with all the annoying issues related to the neighborhood- I had to get used to it. 
I had to adapt to their lifestyle. 

(Wasn't it too abusive?) 

After an ordinary day in the lab -then I had a pos doc position at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-, I got home, wanting to drink and to smoke, or wanting to write and to listen garage punk , or wanting to read a book in silence, or wanting to play the guitar, or wanting to watch porno -in resume, wanting to do all the things that I was used to do for almost 6 years, the time my wife and I were married and living together- but the apartment was, as I mentioned, some sort of a cozy Sunday breakfast. 

My personal space was occupied. 
My wife's friend settled in my studio, so I couldn't use it.
When she wasn't slept, she was talking in there with her sister and her mother. 
They came precisely when my wife wasn't home. 

Her father was watching TV in the living room. Even if I tried to focus on writing -and to avoid alcohol and tobacco, 'cause the small nephew of my wife's friend was running everywhere and I didn't feel free to use drugs-, her father insisted to talk to me.

(Apparently, he thought I was wasting my time on Facebook, or something like that.) 

It was a truly complicated period to me. 

Not just for these issues, but 'cause them never had seen me as an adult.

They don't even know, nor care about what I do -I suppose they think that I'm like a teacher in high school-, but they were always speaking of the father of the kid and all the amazing things he did in his job. 

I still don't have kids nor a car, and apparently they think that both things make you an adult.  

When I finally had a moment alone, I drank as crazy and I tried to write, or play music, in my studio. But my wife's friend was kind of distracted and dirty, and she used to left her underwear lying on the floor or on her bed. 

If I was really high at that time, I couldn't stop having impure thoughts.
I had to quit writing and to left the studio immediately.
Her underwear put me really mad and furious. 
Couldn't focus on anything else but her underwear. 

My wife's friend left the apartment almost three years ago. 
Obviously her family stopped making a Sunday breakfast on a daily basis in the apartment. 
Drug abuse provoked me a gastric problem, to the point I had to have surgery.
I feel free, again. 
I returned to my lonely habits -except that I don't drink nor smoke- and I stopped arguing with my wife.

(We had a lot of problems, when her friend's family used to come on a daily basis to the apartment). 

Last night, out of nowhere, I had a weird dream.
I was at the University and suddenly my wife's friend appeared. 
She dressed her classical lab coat of a student of the School of Medicine.
She smiled and then invited me to the movie theatre. 

I asked here if I could invite my wife, too. 
She said "No" 'cause she didn't want to worry her. 
Even though I thought she was flirting, I accepted.

When we were about to watch the movie, she stared at me.
We were sitting next to each other, almost in front of the screen.
The flashes on the screen illuminated my wife's friend's face.
Her lips were so fleshy and her eyes were possessed by desire. 
I thought she was about to kiss me, but she just put one of her legs around one of mine.
The touch drove me wild. It was like an electric trim. 
Her leg was warm and it made me feel so excited and guilty.
I woke up. 

Dunno why, but I remember my wife's friend each time I hear one song of Clics Modernos.
I'm almost able to see her dancing while the music elapses.
Mainly with the first chords of the song.

This is the song:

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