Like The Coldest Winter Chill

I'm pretty worried. I have a thousand things to do and I can't tell anyone. 
I feel so guilty, like if I were a lazy and irresponsible guy. 

The last couple of weeks, I've been working in home. 

The last days I went to the university, I shared space and time with four women.
Two of them are pregnant. Other is younger than me and probably she travels on a daily basis from Lerma to Mexico City and viceversa, and she's exposed to unknown viruses from unknown people. 

The other woman maybe has my age. She has told me that we knew each other when we were postgraduate students, almost ten years ago. She says someday I went to the lab where she worked and a friend of her introduced us. Honestly, I dunno remember that day.

Her husband works at a hospital and they have two kids. He was exposed to COVID-19 suspicious' patients the entire week. She was snoozing and coughing all day long and she told me that she was allergic and that she had forgotten her anti histamines. I believed her. 

Even though we avoided physical contact, some students went to the office. Some of them tried to give you the hand and some of them coughed and sneezed. 

Also, on an everyday basis I was traveling from my house to the university and back from university on public transportation. In Lerma, there are some sort of shared cabs and I took four of them each day. Passengers were pretty close to me. Some of them coughed and sneezed, like if they were harmless behaviors. It was impossible to keep distance. 

The last day I came back from university, I was OK. 

The day after, I had to go to the supermarket. We we're running out of food!

We took an Über. We did what we needed to do, as fast as we could. 

The supermarket was sort of empty. There were just a few customers walking here and there. 
I saw an elderly couple making their shopping and I suddenly imagined that my wife and myself could be those elders at some point, and I felt excited. 

Even though I have a bad feeling on that, I just can't stop thinking of one period of my life on which I can do all the stuff I love to do –writing, playing my electric guitars, reading–, just as I do now, but excluding all these horrible bureaucratic issues I sometimes have to deal with... and just giving a fuck for the entire world.  

It called my attention one thing: the section of canned food was almost empty. 

As we were about to pay our shopping, I started to have the chills. 

Later, back in home, I felt sort of ill. I had abrupt changes of temperature and I felt weak and sleepy. I felt my bones hurting, like if I just had walked for miles under a heavy rain. I was exhausted and I thought I was about to have the flu. 

On these days it's impossible to be unaware of COVID-19 symptoms' and I got worried.

Maybe I was just paranoid, but what if I was about to get sick...?, what if I would have to isolate from my wife and from the world...?, what if someone in the job had just infected me?

To things get worst, my wife is hypertensive...

I talked to my sister in law –she's a physician– and I told her how I felt and she recommended me to take some Paracetamol pills. 

I had a couple of terrible nights. 

I dreamt my colleague –the one who was coughing and snoozing in the real world– and myself had some sort of ill relationship. We were hiding from all the people who know us and trying to have a serious conversation. I sensed that she was pregnant and I was so afraid and I felt so stupid. 

As the dream progressed, the environment became darker and colder. It seemed that the Earth was getting sick, too. 

I also had hypnopompic hallucinations of my colleague and I woke up several times repeating a magic word who supposedly would end up this pandemic. 
Obviously, I was febrile. 

I had nightmares and I barely slept three or five hours per night. 

The entire weekend, I felt so weird. 

I convalesced watching some old Headbanger's Ball shows' with Alice In Chains on YouTube. It was very strange. They were premiering some videos of their 1995' eponymous album. I have heard that album several times, I like it a lot. I even own a physical exemplar of the compact disc. I bought it at El Chopo a couple of weeks ago. It's sad to realize that compact discs are in extinction pathways. 

Nevertheless, I hadn't watched their videos. Neither I had seen an interview of the band around that time. 

As I saw Layne Staley, with an heroin-addict appearance, trying to focus on the silly questions of Riky Rachtman, I realized that I never think of him as a contemporary of Kurt Cobain and Mark Lanegan –even though I'm a big fan of Tom Hansen's awesome novel, on which he describes, in a pretty rad way, how “heroin world” was in the early 90's–, but as a musician from another time and genre. 

I supposed my opinion is influenced by the fact that someone who I really dislike introduced me to Alice In Chains and that he was crazy about Mad Season. 

It was pretty strange. 

And, for a couple of seconds, as I died on my bed, I felt I was fifteen years old and that I was watching for the very first time an Alice In Chains' music video. I ended up thinking about myself back then. In resume: in 1995, my life wasn't as boring as it seemed to me. I just was a damned stupid. I didn't even know how to play “Queen of the rodeo” on guitar. All I wanted to have was enough time to read poetry, to write poems and to befriend with a crazy punk rocker girl. 

Now, as the disease spreads across the country and the authorities seem to give a fuck about the physicians, the small businessmen and the rest of the citizens, I have to deal with the fact that my colleagues might see me as an irresponsible lazy guy. 

(Really guys, believe or not: my life would be on risk if I moved from Lerma to Mexico City, on a daily basis.) 

I live in Lerma 'cause I have to teach classes almost everyday, 'cause I have academic meetings almost everyday... 'cause I have to work on a million bureaucratic issues... I don't have a car to move by my own resources and by my own risk to Mexico City. I don't even drive. I have not even had a driver's license!

Besides, I can't eat as a normal person. Moving implies many complications to me. 

A couple of years ago, I had a surgery and I can't fast for more than three hours and I cannot eat the food normal people eat. Moving is not a simple option to me, right now. 

My colleagues perform some experiments in Mexico City. They are allowed to do it before 14: 00. I spend three hours from my house to the lab. Public transport currently has some limited schedules. It's pretty complicated. 

Hate to say so. 

On this quarantine, I wake up early in the morning and I turn on the laptop and I start to work from 8:00 to almost 18:00 0r 19:00. 

Usually I have a couple of meetings via Skype, at last once per week. 

For two weeks I've been writing the discussion of a paper. Normally, I don't even have time to do it. I just, in general, dislike the data, but I must publish this paper, some way or another.

Right now, I have to write a protocol from a totally different research project... I have to make an awful tax process... I have to start writing at last one review from a totally different topic... I have to start to prepare virtual classes for the two courses... and I wish I could enjoy everything I do, but I feel so guilty. 

I really hate it. 

Heaven Beside You

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.  

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

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

Runny Nose And Runny Yolk

We're about to leave the city. 

As I'm blogging, my wife is waiting for the moving truck.

The apartment is a disaster. 

There are boxes everywhere.

The cats are so freak out. 

I'm web surfing on a Samsung tablet, sit on an old easychair. 

It's one of the few furnishings available. Everything else is wrapped on plastic.

The first thing I did today was to caugh. 

I feel dizzy and ill. 

In the whole year I never got sick, but I had to get sick precisely now. 

I would like to rest the entire day, but I'll have to be awake. 

Our new house is about an hour and a half from here. 

Things have to be done.
I prefer to be sick right now than to be healthy and unemployed the entire next year.

This is the price I have to pay. 

The last six months I was looking for a better job.

I was about to quit and to give a different direction to my career. 

A month ago, out of nowhere, my boss told me about a potential opportunity. 

We're moving to Lerma. I got a new job. 

It's going to be the best job I ever had. 

It's better to have a sick day than to have a dark future.

In The Someday, What's That Sound?