With Animals Staring At Your Cleavage

Last weekend, I drunk too much alcohol.

Each time I do it, weird things happen. 

One of these weird things consists in starting to talk to strangers.

Another weird thing is that I say what I really think about them. 

The last weekend some friends came to my place.

Someone invited a chubby girl. 

I had seen her at another parties. 

It's impossible to ignore her. 

She's a big breasted girl and she usually wears blouses with cleavage. 

Someone told me that her dad had died a few months ago. 

Supposedly her personality changed a lot. 

When she arrived, I was kind of drunk, having a conversation in the living room. 

I was talking about the Mexican soccer team and its limited opportunities to transcend in the next World Cup in South Africa. 

As I spoke I sensed that Antonia was incessantly looking at me.

As usual, she wore a blouse with cleavage. 

As she seemed to want to make eye contact with me, I couldn't stop thinking of her cleavage. 

I tried to focus on the conversation, but it was so impressive. 

At some point, I stood up.

I took another beer from the fridge. 

When I closed the door, Antonia was there. 

She scared me. 

She smiled and kinda bit her lips in a pretty suggestive way. 

I shrugged my shoulders and offered her my beer.

She accepted. Again I opened the door of the fridge and then I took another beer. 

As I was doing it, I couldn't stop thinking about her cleavage. 

I had seeing it briefly as I gave her my beer. 

The boiling image of the abyss between her breasts exploded madly in my brain. 

I was really drunk.  

We sit face to face in the dinning room. 

I took a sip of the beer and I closed my eyes. 

I felt so excited. 

I had that boiling image in front of me. 

When I opened my eyes, I felt dizzy. 

Antonia started to talk. 

I made my best to focus on her face. 

She studies at the National School of Plastic Arts and she's a big fan of mac Operative System. She also likes to take photographs. 

I had nothing to say. 

Then she asked me random things about monkeys and science. 

As a lot of people do, Antonia believed that science's goal is deciphering why laziness and bad temper are related to high IQs. 

She even told me about a supposedly journalistic article on which some researchers found that obesity is related to bad relationships. 

She also believed that monkeys were some sort of funny primates. 

Dunno remember what did I tell her, but certainly she was surprised. 

Suddenly we were talking about music. She loved The Doors and she couldn't understand why do I like Nirvana. For her, Kurt Cobain was a terrible composer and musician. She pissed me off. She barely knew Nevermind. This album was her only one reference.  

She asked me too many things and she took advantage of my drunkenness. 

Despite I was drunk, I could sense that she was talking to me in a very sexual way. 

She continued bitting her lips and smiling. 

Maybe she was drunk, too. 

At some point, I realized I had stopped looking at her cleavage. 

Then, I watched it again. 

I felt I was like a thirsty vampire and I decided to talk about it. 

She laughed and reacted as if what I had said would have flattered her. 

I told her what kind of photographs I like. 

Obviously, I told her I love the ones with cleavages.  

Later, she left my place. 

Now, I feel so stupid. 

I feel so sorry and confused. 

(What the hell was she trying to do?)

[So Alone-Lou Reed]

You're A Shooting Star

I had just finished packing my luggage. I was exhausted, and indescribably sad, ready to go to the O'Hare Airport and then to return to Mexico City. My labmates were slept, and I just watched them as I kinda thought of my life. It was a dismal environment, almost sickening. 

I started to listen One In A Million thru my headphones. The song put me nostalgic. It had been my first time in USA. The annual meeting for the Society for Neurosciences had been amazing. Never thought it would be as big an intense, as it actually was. Lab colleagues had warned me about it, but I just thought they had been dramatic. I even spoke to Eric Kandel, or, more precisely, he asked me if I knew where could he check in and pick up his bag and his badge. He came closer to me, as I was about to buy some tea in a Starbucks in the McCormick Place, when he did it. When I told him what to do, pronouncing my best english, and he said "Thanks" and walked away, people watched me, as if they were thinking "Why did Kandel talked to him?", or "Why he didn't asked him for a photograph?" I knew my advisor would kill for that opportunity.

For a while, I interpreted the presence of Kandel in my life, in that precise moment, as a reminder of my compromise with science. Sometimes during my postgraduate studies, I realized that maybe I wasn't too smart, or too commited with science, to become a real 24/7 scientist. I didn't like all the topics in neurosciences -even though I assumed I had to learn and comprehend the basics-, and many times I preferred to read a novel or to write a short story rather than read or write a scientific paper.

Under the dismal atmosphere on that Hilton room, as one of my labmates snored over and over again, I thought it had been an exciting trip, but anyway I felt alone and dumb. Close my eyes and tried to focus on the lyrics of that Guns N' Roses' song, and then I felt I was kinda an immigrant and a fagot at the same time, while waiting for a Greyhound to travel to LA and hoping that the travel induced a great change in my life. As that annual meeting progressed, I started to consider that my poster -the resume of my academic work until then- was insignificant, as compared to the standard posters of other postgraduate students, obviously supported for first world science. I wanted to cry. It was frustrating.   

Day after day, I woke up early, took a shower, had breakfast in a nice restaurant called The Bakery Shop, and then I took the official bus to the McCormick Place. I attended the meeting from 8 am to 17 or 18 pm and I returned to the Hilton hotel, everyday, while I was on Chicago. The day it was my poster session, I stayed there the whole period, almost 4 hours, or so. I met asian, european and african scientists and, obviously, US residents and scientists. Japanese seemed interested in my poster, but as I asked them if they wanted me to explain it to them, they just ran away. "We do not tell english well", said one of them. 

Women were beautiful. They were from all over the world. I was only married a year, or so. Maybe less than it. Definitely I will always like women, and I felt kind of guilty when I was looking at those gorgeous women from all over the world, considering what would I do if I had the opportunity to have an affair with one of them. 

As we walked to the subway and took almost an hour to get to the airport, I watched the suburbs of Chicago and thought of the crimes of Al Capone and the italian mobs.  

I was excited for the experience, but sad. I couldn't even meet the Aragon Ballroom nor the Metro. Chicago seemed a beautiful and great city to me, but I just ran that very last day, early in the morning, to meet the Soldier Field. 

I found out that my work was meaningless. I guess I never recovered from that impression. 

One In A Million

I'm All Out Of Faith

In the spring of 1999, 10 years ago, it began the student work stoppage at UNAM. Even though Psychology School -and UNAM, in general- was closed due to political reasons, I went to school almost twice per week and I saw many students really involved in several activities to inform people about the situation. There was a kitchen in the school and everyone was helping out students. Students were organized and they seemed to have a purpose. 

  
By the end of autumn, the student work stoppage looked endless. Ciudad Universitaria was a disaster. Tons of garbage surrounded the campus. Students and some other unidentified guys, lived in there. Laboratories and classrooms were small apartments. Entire basic research projects were dead. Experimental animals were starved and dirty, or dead. Sophisticated computers and Skinner boxes available for basic research experiments had disappeared, had been stolen, or simply didn't work. People taking drugs everywhere was common. 

I started to feel sick. I was bored, desperate, tired and sleepy all the time. The physician told me I needed to get involved in some academic or physical activity. I had been for months just reading and writing at home, and visiting Ciudad Universitaria once in a while.  

Didn't have real friends nor a girlfriend, so I was kind of lonely and depressed, too.
I went to a literary workshop, to get rid off my nerves, and there I met some guys interested in writing. After a while, we started to hang out. We drank alcohol and read our poems. It was nice, even though I didn't like their attitude. They behave like if they were a living poem. 

Suddenly, a tiny little girl arrived to the workshop. Her name was Natalia, and looked pretty shy. She knew some guys at the workshop and she greeted them with a kiss in the mouth. It was a very hippie thing, to me. Hated it. I thought she maybe had sex with them regularly, too. It was disgusting.   

Her poems were incredibly sordid and sad, but awesome. 

One of the guys at the workshop, studied at TEC de Monterrey. He liked Xavier Villaurrutia and he wrote poems, too. When it was his birthday, he invited us to his house. We drank all night long. He studied physics and talked about Einstein. The other guys talked about Piedra De Sol and Muerte Sin Fin. I was more into suspense than poetry, so they kinda bored me. 

At some point, Natalia started to kiss me. We were completely drunk. Her brackets drove me wild. I started to feel her hair in my lips and mouth, and I complained about it. She smiled and said that her hair was a part of her, too. 

It was funny, but when we were sober, back at the workshop another day, Natalia started to behave as if she wanted to be my girlfriend. I was so prejudiced. Didn't like hippies, nor poets. Later, she started to write me letters and poems, and I always told her I didn't want to have a relationship with her. 

She got my telephone number and called me up once. She was drunk and crying. Asked me why I didn't want to be her boyfriend. I told her that she was a very sad person, even to me, and that I didn't want to get involved with a sad person. 

She told me that she didn't want to be a sad person, and tried to blackmail me. Natalia wanted me to know that she was able to kill herself, and finished rephrasing Dostoievski: 

"I believed in God, but he doesn't believe in me".            

Someone told me she's married to a junkie and that they lived in a small hippie village close to the sea. They make a living off of arts and crafts. I'm sure I'll never see Natalia again. 

I still have her letters, at my mom's house. I'm curious about what they exactly say. 

[Torn-Ednaswap]

Slip of the pen

Torn