“mexico”

Ah, I’m happy. As I ride the CalTrain from San Jose, I realize that after less than a week I feel more at home here, more at ease, than I’ve ever felt in Mexico. Tuesday I went to a Long Now talk by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and got to glimpse such legendary people as Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. Yesterday night I went to Google (!) to an Android talk after having spent the morning in the Asian museum and the afternoon studying in the library. Today I just finished the first half of a wonderful (free!) 2-day course on AIR from Adobe. The plan is to cap the day with some Permutation City at the public library. Ah, this is how I want to live!

And it’s not only the flashy things that have me captivated, it’s being alone again, having problems and solving them, meeting strangers every day, waking before dawn effortlessly because there’s so much to do… It’s being able to speak in the same language that I think and enjoying my tongue as it twists and rolls on its own better than I had ever seen it. It’s seeing Lynda.com ads on the bus stop. It’s noticing everyday a new, unexpected way that tasks are streamlined here, automated —small pieces of civilization, like the chord to request for a stop in buses, how their doors open by standing on the steps, or how their stops are automatically both announced by a pre-recorded voice and displayed in an electronic ticker. It’s learning new, cutting-edge technologies and having someone to talk them with (never had felt like a “developer” before until I realized I felt at ease among them). It’s finding a purdy gal everytime you look around (not just lust, the ratio of childfree 20/30-somethings is way up). It’s eating a different cuisine every day (recent finds: chicken tikka masala and thai pancakes). It’s that sense of mastery at turning the new into routine and rhythm.

Now I just have to find a way to hack the law and become a free agent (someone who can work and start a startup) or I’ll have to move sooner rather than later to Canada… any ideas?

The words came to mind when I was looking for a great Mexican restaurant around town (figured better late than never to get to know my city!) and by far the best online resources I found where English-language Frommer’s and Fodor’s.

I ended up going to Sacromonte and it was excellent. Interestingly, I ate some of the best Mexican food this city has to offer surrounded by foreigners.

Boy, how much fun has this book been! Efrain Bartolome’s Educacion emocional en veinte lecciones [review] is exactly what the title implies —an emotional education, a coginitive-behavioral approach to learning to handle your emotions—, I just never thought it would be this much fun.

I stumbled on it combing the city’s book fair for books originally written in Spanish, as has been my custom for the last couple of years. It was a difficult choice, it was pricey ($200 pesos), had too facile a title and yet managed to be intimidating with its 300 pages of dense prose. It apparently lied somewhere between selfhelp and psychotherapy, both of which I dislike. But then its recency (2006), its being written by a Mexican UNAM professor, its initial quote:
its excellent typography (!), its suggestive index and its author being a renowned poet besides a psychologist made me put out.

I’m glad I did. Whatever the book’s merits the best compliment I can give it is that it has changed me, far more deeply that I can tell this close to the reading but I think and feel different ever since.

How not to love a book that manages to be densely precise and technical while still being fresh, humble, and (Mexicanly) casual—always struggling for clarity, for precision.

How not to love a book that manages to delve deep into theory while being chock-full of practical suggestions—always struggling to convince you, to change you.

How not to love a book that suggests buying a pornographic magazine as an exercise in selfcontrol, proposes a condom-buying dare, explains respiratory meditation, entrances you with the stream-of-consciousness of an addict, and finishes lessons by sprinkling a sufi story (the tale of the two brothers) or a beautiful metaphor (“Se como el sandalo que perfuma al hacha que lo hiere” / “Be like sandalwood that perfumes the axe that hurts it.”)?

If you care about selfhelp books this is by far the best I’ve ever read. If you care about psychotherapy this is by far the best I’ve ever read too (no Freudian bullshit!). I earnestly and sincerely recommend it, grab it wherever you can find it.

(I’m personally looking for extra copies to give away but Gandhi doesn’t have it in stock and its editor, Paidos, doesn’t list it online—do drop a message if you find it somewhere).

After 3 years of searching for local soulmates in this middle-of-Mexico, beautiful-but-digitally-backward city of mine, as I’m packing for the states, I google idly on San Francisco and, behold, I find the incredible blog of a Guadalajara genius with the same web obsession, the same reading compulsion, the same format fiddly inclinations, the same penchant for writing only in overcrafted English, the same relocation (his some 2.5 years ago, to go work with Max Levchin ^ELZR, no less).

His name’s Sergio I. Villarreal Pou and following his commenters’ links I’ve found a tangle of worthy local websites (say, the multiple-personality disorder No Limit studio or the gorgeous Arathael) that opens up what is to me a wholly uncharted local sphere. Which I’ll probably be exploring some thousand miles away…

“Jalisco va a dominar el mundo,” says one of dad’s friends from Los Altos, a migrant region of Jalisco. “Estados Unidos va a dominar el mundo y los Jalisquillos van a dominar Estados Unidos.”

What structure would you give to Mexico’s 2006 GDP, the wealth it generated in a year? Just gather your prejudices, take a guess, and try to put it into numbers.

Via Richard, un bizarrisimo video local: La Tapatia de El Personal. Producido por alumnos del CUAAD ^WP, el video es practicamente una guia sui generis del centro de Guadalajara.

Ah, no se, es tan malo que es bueno… Ademas de que siempre es raro ver cultura local capturada en medios como el video y la musica.

English first names might be all the rage in Mexico^ELZR, but haven’t you noticed how American Hispanic last names are starting to sound? I’m not just taking about Jennifer Lopez, Cameron Diaz, or Ricky Martin, I’m talking biotechnologist Juan Enriquez^WP, essayist Richard Rodriguez^{WP, ELZR}, dancer David Bernal^{YT, WP}, Google’s George Reyes^WP, ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas^WP, filmmaker Robert Rodiguez^WP, Synopsys’s Brian Cabrera^F, cartoonist Michael Ramirez^WP, YouTVPC’s Sam Martinez^WSJ, actresses Sara Ramirez^WP and Michelle Rodriguez^WP, jurist Alberto Gonzales^WP. It is not my intention to give a Hispanic hit parade^WP, my only point here is how through habituation these most Latin of last names are getting an English ring to them.

Why doesn’t it have its Pepsi and its RC Cola? Its Burger King and its Carl’s Jr? Its Adidas and its Rebook? Everyone likes to dismiss it as overpriced McCoffee but if so, why haven’t competitors of remotely comparable size and ambition sprung up in its obviously profitable and still rather vacant niche—the third place^WP? Why is it instead that it has mushroomed globally to the point of cannibalization and watering down? The closest thing I know of a competitor is—and I’m surely biased by being in Mexico—Mexican Punta del Cielo. Though it at least gets the basic idea right and is at least as designed as Starbucks (a crucial point), it is still puny (20 stores) and not particularly innovative. So, again, why does Starbucks stand alone?

Espanhol llano es espanhol escrito sin acentos, ñ (que se suele sustituir por nh, nn o simplemente n), dieresis o signos de puntuacion iniciales (¿¡).

Perfectamente inteligible para hablantes del dialecto ortografico dominante, el espanhol llano entra en auge a la par que el teclado, cuya dificultad intrinseca para escribir caracteres especiales se vuelve el argumento original a su favor. Hoy en dia las razones para usarlo son enormemente variadas.

Genial la mas reciente portada de Proceso. Todo un logro de diseño grafico en su simplicidad.