I'm So Excited, I Can't Wait To Meet You There

As the quietly room is occupied by cats and sunlight and street sounds and wildlife, I start to forget you. Before the soft and blue substance of these thoughts vanished, I will make my best to maintain you on this secret spot I have been building for the last decade. 

I just can't ignore this calm that invades me. I just can't ignore this atmosphere. It smells like freshly washed sheets and it evokes several cozy ideas on me. It makes me feel like a stupid teenager. It makes me close my eyelids and to travel miles away from my real life.

I almost see myself from my inside.

We are in 1999. 

I'm walking to the swimming pool. 
My parents decided to bring us to these cabins in Cuernavaca.
It's the first time we spend a weekend in this place. 
I can't tell how they find it out, but it's a nice place. 

There are soccer fields and basketball and tennis courts. 
There are twenty or thirty cabins, next to a forest.
There is also a restaurant.  

A few hours ago, we played a soccer game with some tourists. 
We were giving them up a ridiculous beating. 
They were so stupid to play soccer. Most of them were fat and clumsy. 
A moron didn't tolerate the humiliation. He hit the soccer ball so hard that it made my dad bled. I hated him. I'm thinking on revenge.   

I've been also playing tennis with one of my brothers. 
I didn't remember how much I enjoy to play tennis. I even used to watch tennis matches on TV when I was a kid, instead of watching cartoons. I guess female tennis players attracted me. I loved the way the air made their skirts flew thru the court as they ran to hit the ball with the racket. I also loved the shapes of their firm legs. It also surprised me that women seemed fragile and quiet, but they could be so strong and they could scream violently. 

I'm thinking that I barely have the opportunity to play tennis. I think it sucks. 

I'm kind of pissed off. I would have preferred to stay home. 
I have realized that I just find it awkward to be surrounded by my family. 
It's not like our last holidays. We even brought our small nephew with us. He's four years old and seems to be the only really happy one. 

I love my family, but I just don't feel OK. 
I'm just a teenager, pretending to act like an adult. 

The university is on a strike since April. It is a disaster. The last time I went to see how it was goin' –some of my classmates and a few hundred other students, are “taking care” of the facilities–, the School of Psychology was a hotel and the Central Library was a dinning room. The entire Ciudad Universitaria was a dump surrounded by cyclonic mesh. 

It was so creepy. 

Nobody knows it, but it's a pretty stressful situation for me. I'm lost. I'm worried. I'm depressed. The only thing I do, is to be a student. I'm such a coward. 

Why haven't I just looked for a job, to keep my mind busy...? 

I've been obsessively thinking on the uncertainty of my academic future. 
I've been supposedly reinforcing my History of Psychology lessons, but, to be honest, I just cannot tell you about a single topic. I have had difficulties to learn. 

I also have been reading Dante Alighieri's most famous book and I just have had difficulties to enjoy it. I've been daydreaming with my own Beatrice and I've been suffering my own private hell. 

What would happen if I dared to give a 180° turn to my life...?

I could work on Mix up, I could work as a waiter on a coffee shop, if I really wanted to. 
I'm so apathetic. I'm so pathetic. I just can't quit my comfort zone. 

Besides daydreaming with the sudden appearance of my own Beatrice, I read 19th century writers, I write 19th century like-poems and weep and complain.  

The sun rays irradiate my childish body as I walk to the swimming pool.  

“I'm so excited, 

I can't wait to meet you there...”

sings Kurt Cobain inside my head, as my heart beats so hard. 

Though it is the calm part of the song, I'm sure that my heart sounds louder than Dave Grohl's drums and that Kurt Cobain's Jaguar on the noisy part of the song. 

My most precious treasures are an old Aiwa walkman, my headphones and my small collection of cassettes. This time, obviously, I'm listening Lithium. 

Music is so important to me. Nirvana has accompanied me since I started senior high school. It has been sort of a cursed. I am stuck in the past. I know I should listen to different genres and to listen different bands (alive ones?), but even though I have tried, it just hasn't work. 

I've been trying to listening No Code, too. I can't tell exactly why there is something about Eddie Vedder I dislike. This album seems so 1995. 
  
I have a crush. I'm almost sure that I will find you in the swimming pool, like I did the first time I saw you. I'm really excited. 

Suddenly, my legs start to shake.  

Though I don't even remember your face, I feel so enthusiastic about seeing you again.

A few days later, I watched a soccer game on TV. 
Our national team won its most relevant tournament so far. 
The Mexican players beat up Brazil in an exciting game. A young player named Ronaldinho was on the field. TV commentators said he was the next star of Brazilian soccer. He's nineteen years old, or so. 

At the time of the game, it was raining. It had been a hot day. 
At a moment, before the soccer game, I was so bored that I went to swim.

And then I saw you.  

You had a black swimwear. Your natural way of behaving left me breathless. 
You looked so gorgeous. Your brown long hair floated on the water like a living miracle defying the laws of gravity. I would like to write an elaborated thought about each component of your beauty, but I would be a liar. I have to admit it. I couldn't ignore your breasts. They made me feel weak and strong at the same time. 

Immediately, I dove into the water to hide my excitement.
I sort of swim to get close to you. You were swimming, too. 

At a moment, as we stopped swimming, we made eye contact. 
It could be for a second, but it felt like eternity. 

I believed you smiled and waited for me to speak to you.
I sensed it, in the very same way I sensed it in those girls in junior high school I kissed. 

Despite all our efforts to make it clear that we own a neocortex, we're still mammals. 
Our brain has evolved, but we still need water and food, to survive. Our brain has evolved, but we still need sex to perpetuate our specie. Our brain has evolved, but we still have to cut it off when we're starved, no matter if we have to interrupt our most sophisticated cognitive abilities. Hormones, olfaction and sight remind us that we are still animals. It's hard to be exempt from our nature.  

Of course, I didn't speak to you. 
 
                              

Though I barely saw you then, I couldn't stop thinking about you. I have felt like a confused young, like I think of Marcel Proust when he wrote how he idealized mysterious women on his vacations on Balbec. 

(In fact, as I am pounding the keyboard and trying to capture you on this secret spot, I see myself as the main character of In the shadow of young girls in flower.)

Since that hot day, your presence has been haunting me. 

I closed my eyelids this morning, while I was in the shower. 
I had impure thoughts about you. I also thought about your eyes and your beautiful hair floating in the swimming pool. Yesterday, as I fell asleep, I started to have hypnagogic hallucinations on which you allowed me to watch your naked breasts behind that black swimwear. It was so exciting. The images left me breathless. For a second, as I woke up, I had no reasons to consider that dreams aren't better than life. 

I finally arrive to the swimming pool. 
I sit in a chair, a few steps from the water.
I sense on my face the reflection of the summer sun diving into the water.  
My lungs are penetrated by the singular smell of chlorine. 
I'm so happy. 

I turn on the volume of the walkman. I focus on Kurt Cobain's voice. I focus on Dave Grohl's cymbals and snare drum. I focus on Krist Novoselic's bass. 

I take a deep breath. 
I look for you. 

There you are. 

Lithium

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