Las abuelas alcahuetas

We don't need the help of anyone or anything to perceive reality and understand it. We do, however, need each other to distort it, overstate it, filter it, edit it, hide it or augment it.

Los dientes del perro

What I've learned so far: I can't, and I won't do anything that I don't like to do. The 'can't' part is a fact: I've known it all along; but the 'won't' is an assertion I've made. The most valuable aspect of this doctoral process is that it leads to a decision that would forcefully bring passion and attitude. 

Passion to defend your ideas, passion to understand things, and attitude to face twists and turns on the way. It's an openness to any consequence, it's faith in the unknow, more than a finesse of a mental capacity or the completion of an intellectual feat. It has no end. It goes with you.

It's like Nascar: you are happy to see the cars turning several times around the oval until they make it to the end, and at the same time there is a part of you that would also be happy to see a crash, a fire.

Oikos

Most of the times the work environment provided to us is set by the former owner, or pre-assembled by an architect or an interior designer, leaving us no other choice but to "carve" our own environment out of the previous one, as if it were an sculptor's task.

However, this is the first time that I have managed to arrange my work environment from scratch, just like a painter on an empty canvas, and even though it looks like the same old sh@#!, the feeling is different and fulfilling.

I advise to buy all gadgets at once, because this exchange rate has just gone mad.

Hunger Abs

An uneven match between developed and developing countries; a disadvantage perfectly sustained by the system: countries that always win and countries that always lose; a bad dream, which in contrast to the physiological one, needs noise rather than silence to be maintained. I wish I had a time machine to go back in time and enjoy of a cleaner environment, a fairer society, further away from Armageddon.

After reading about all the atrocities that have been committed against the environment in my country, I glimpse many ways of proceeding: from not doing anything to creating a militia group. Non of these solutions succeeds in a 100%, especially if they seem to be rapidly effective. 

I would say it is noble to try to preserve the past and the resources, but in order to do so we have to make our own mistakes; we have to update errors in history. Evil comes disguised anyway.

Need a little time to wake up

Three conditions are desirable for creating a conductive environment for research: to stay away from day-to-day problems, to have a flexible schedule, and not to be worried about money. However, these three same conditions are also ideal to promote leisure.

It's been almost a week since I returned home and I am now at a stage where I just wanna chill and don't do anything else. At this point it is prevailing to resume activities to prevent my holidays being extended.

I used these days to retrace known places and walk and hear the streets, see people's faces, how they endure the unfairness of life with charm, distilling a pride that cannot be taken from them, reminding me that I am not more or less of what I behold here, of what I remember I ever was.

QWERTZ vs QWERTY

Nobody ever estimated the time lost in first getting used to the german Qwertz keyboard and later in getting used back to Qwerty again. That's re-search in one of its purest and shallowest exhibitions.

My own master, my own disciple

There comes a point after classes, as literary review takes shape, when I realize that the world is ok, and that all major problems are somehow being taken care of; it is an amazing and liberating feeling per se if it weren't for the fact that I'm being paid and recognized for coming up with an innovative and effective way to solve a high-priority problem in the world.

At this point I also feel that I'm of no use at all: not for my previous co-workers whom I haven't talked to for a while; not for my current colleagues who seem to be too busy or at least too dazed by the burden of their ongoing research; not for my family, which seems to have managed to go on without my presence for a long time now.

However, about three weeks before the date of my flight back home, and after a meeting for the first time ever with my supervisor (more like a Nathan Jones - Phil Martin arm wrestling than a meeting), I started to see my topic elucidate in a clearer way. It was for sure the time pressure kicking in.