“personal”

Chiba is where she’s from. William Gibson’s Neuromancer also took place here. It’s the eastern sleeperside of Tokyo and I currently call it home. Its kanji mean thousand leaves and so, of course, the mille-feuille is the official cake. Japanese make a great deal of its shape and 2 animal logos based on it are in current use. Isn’t the yellow one captivating in its deformity?

As a kid some of the books that I most reread were from the Time Life science library, an affordable expensive (at that time and place) and fascinating book collection my parents happily bought for the family. They say that when I was very, very young the book I loved the most was the one about Primates, which had lots and lots of great pictures of monkeys.

But I don’t remember that far (I have a poor memory of very early childhood).

The rest of the year will be as exciting as always! As I said just a post ago, I’m now in London and for a week more I’ll stay here, culturally my favorite city in the world. The next week I’ll move to Oxford—I’ve often fantasized about living in a university town, this is the university town. In both cities I’ll stay in great rented rooms (cheaper and better than hostels, of which I’ve seen more than my life’s share already)!

By late August I’ll fly to Hong Kong for a few days, the world’s first Special Economic Zone, Friedman’s miracle of capitalism. Then off to Singapore for a month, where I’ll meet her and we’ll stay in a beautiful rented room better than most hotels, a great find. In 1960 S’pore was as wealthy per person as Mexico, 3 decades later it was 4 times wealthier and still is—it’ll be fascinating to witness one of the world’s most succesful countries. Then off to Bangkok for a month, living cheaply, coding lots, and eating delicious Thai food every single meal!

Then 1.5 months to Chiba: Japan again! To live with her, finally learn Japanese (I can’t say I lived in Japan for 7.5 months and still suck so much at it), and perhaps try my hand at the Japanese job market once more. I’ve missed her far too much.

Finally back to Mexico in time for the holidays.

Wish me luck!

I lived for 3 months in Spain. I shared a room with 3 other people in a nice, simple flat in the northeast of Madrid. Less than 10 minutes away walking was a big mall with a cheap hypermarket, my gym, and the local public library. I was very happy.

Canada imposes visa on Mexico.

Effective today, isn’t it shocking, how fast the world can move?
Yesterday, as a Mexican, I was able to travel to Canada without jumping through any hoops (other than border agents) for up to 6 months.

This effectively makes me unable to travel there, my ticket to Canada from London is in just a month, far too little to obtain a visa that even in Mexico can only be processed from Mexico City and that is sure to have a huge backlog with the extremely sudden imposition.

I lose my ticket to Canada and I have to get a ticket to Mexico (there’s no more developed world to visit visafree as a Mexican) in the highest season (>$1000 dollars one-way).

She was literally going to buy today her ticket to Vancouver to meet me.

I’m sad, stunned.
I thought the world was moving in the opposite direction…
Just yesterday, for no particular reason, I was idly daydreaming of a future North American integration.

In the age of globalization, my life is unexpectedly being defined by immigration tensions.

Something changed,...

..I’m starting to feel like…

..I’m getting the hang of how to live!

Intermittently through the past 6 months, more and more often, and all over the past week, I’ve been glimpsing a day to day life that fulfills me, that I look at and say, yes, this day, this is the life I want to live.

I’m talking about the little things not the Grand Scheme of Life, the micro not the macro, the structure and weave of daily life—what to eat, when to sleep, what to do, what to work on, what to buy, how to relate to other people, how to love, how to exercise, how to rest, how to organize your time, how to fail, how to recover, how to improve, how to find peace and keep it, how to make a routine, how to be stable, how to find flow, how to live.

Of course I’m only starting, and know next to nothing, and have been far too blessed all along, but for the first time I’ve set it all up and all systems seem to be running smoothly. Exhilarating. Like being able to control your non-training-wheels bike for the first time, the wind rushing by.

I went to Lisbon because I got hostel stranded for the weekend in Spain: all the hostels in Madrid and Barcelona were booked and hotels were so expensive that it was cheaper, and more interesting, for me to take a night bus to Lisbon. Of Lisbon I knew close to nothing.

I arrived at downtown just as the sun was coming out, groggy from barely catching a wink, without a reservation because the hostel aggregators showed there were rooms aplenty (were I not recklessness I would not have gotten stranded in the first place). I decided, at a whim, to follow the first pair of backpackers that I saw. Which I did, and ended up at the other bus station.

From Greg Egan’s Reasons to be Cheerful, one of my favorite short stories ever, an exploration into the meaning of happiness and, tangentially, of romance.

For a while now, I’ve been pleasantly following Very Small Array, an information design graph-blog, but this was the first time I was really enthralled by one of its designs, FRIENDS:

It’s just so stunningly elegant, isn’t it? So skillfully made to appear casual yet imbued with obvious formal beauty, charming yet minimalist—not a word or pixel unused. Labels and graph, typography and information design, come together marvelously, painstakingly.

The thing that most grabbed me, though, was that I had just started making my own similar introspective list of my friends’ attributes, in the spirit of quantified selfhood. While I’m floored by Very Small Array’s commitment (it has been doing this for almost a decade—the chart above is just one of several great graphs and metapgraphs), my brief exercise in self knowledge has already told me two unexpected things: I have a history of liking extroverts and polyglots.