“reminiscing”

I studied math in college because I didn’t believe it. Never could understand how or why someone would come up with the stuff we were being teached. Thanks to some innate verbal ability and motherly discipline, I was thankfully “good” at it though, good enough to realize that what we were “learning” was nothing but mindless regurgitation.

A recent, furious storm marked the likely end of a particularly relentless rain season. Two stories from the (d)rain.

The first one has all the marks of an urban legend but my father claims it was a very notorious case, appearing in all the major newspapers of the time. Some ten or so years ago, two daughters of a famous doctor returned from a party late at night. A storm having raged not long ago, traffic was a deadlock and the streets were quite literally rivers. To save their friends from a long, slow detour, they got off at the sidewalk opposite their home, not minding overmuch the drench.

They never crossed. They never came home. Their bodies were found in the sewer. An open, overflowed manhole having sucked them that night.

The second story is neither as gruesome nor, really, a story, it’s just a droll scrap from the past. It comes down from my mother who, back in Guzman, her hometown, attended a relatively posh, nun-ran school where the good girls were raised. On rainy days a man used to wait at the school’s exit with the simplest of carts—a wheeled platform with handrails front and back. Booted, he would push the cart himself, across the main avenue and back, charging his passengers some cents of a peso in exchange of a dry crossing. Prim catholic schoolgirls crowded.

Rain season again. Wet and wondrous outside.

My grandfather, Luis Cardenas Chavez, died last Saturday from lung cancer. It was a struggle, a mourning, of many months, many of them at my house, at that room up there ↑.

We buried him yesterday, Father’s day here in Mexico. Next Thursday was to be his 85th birthday.

Maybe it was good that his agony ended but, me, all I see is the many meaningful centuries he could have lived. I don’t say that lightly. He had more life and more lives with him than anyone I’ve known and there was at least that much still inside him. He died young. Never without a reason to wake up every morning, today he won’t.

And I feel like I have to say it because only pleasantries and comforting lies were spoken thick and fast at his most Catholic funeral: he’s dead, absolutely annihilated, choked, nothing left of him. We’ve been robbed, someone precious and irreplaceable has been taken from us, for no reason at all, taken and shattered, and we are never getting him back.^ELZR

We never wrote down his memories as we both once planned.^ELZR Always thought there would be a better time later. There wasn’t. What most disappointed me though was myself and how I reacted to his sickness. Or rather, how I not reacted, how I retracted. Oh I helped along, but I did not fight, didn’t read, didn’t research. I never understood his sickness, his ailments, his medicine. It was the scientific, idealistic, techno-utopian thing to do and I left it undone, I muddled thru.

But, to my horror, on top and despite all the sadness, all the frustration, all the personal disappointment, there’s Christina^WP-frantic, exhilarating sensafreedom thru and thru. At last. Just the six of us.

I felt so trapped in this house for so long. So unhappily submerged in rude relatives that diluted my family in their toxic, stupid undertows. Some days ago I realized sadly it would never be my home again. It was just a place all of a sudden. It’s time to go.

But for now I’m here. And I’m happy to. And it’s rain season again. Wet and wondrous outside.

He was a good man.

anglo latin; the origin of latin america as a word; my high school wasn’t bilingual, it was English with Spanish as a second language; I always say math and language are the same ability because they’re the same thing, math is just specialized talk about numbers; but then zoology is just talk about animals…; the difference is that math is, in a farly unparalleled way, advanced through language itself (as opposed to, say, zoology, which, advances chiefly through observation); the way forward in language is through logic; logic is syntax; understanding is synthesizing and paraphrasing; {an algorithm just like flooding to create a machine that understood, as previously defined—one wouldn’t even need to define what a word is}; Wikipedia syntax highlighting!

Glorious, thought-drunken night.

May 10 yesterday was Mother’s day^WP here in Mexico and it was a messy affair, what with my now heart-wrenchingly weak grandfather back in our house and all the sad, crowded tension. Me, I put particular attention to the music. The undisputed classic poem for the day and inevitable tearbomb at elementary schools across the country is El brindis del bohemio (lyrics: “Sólo faltaba un brindis, el de Arturo, el del bohemio puro, de noble corazón y gran cabeza; aquel que sin ambages declaraba que sólo ambicionaba robarle inspiración a la tristeza.”), most famously declaimed by Juan Manuel Bernal. It is terribly cursi, pure schwarmerei and maudlin gesticulation, but at least it’s unabashedly so and good at it. That said, I’m glad we managed the day without it.

What surprised me yesterday was our reaction, my family’s and my cousins’, late at night and with some alcohol involved, to Denisse De Kalafe’s Señora, señora (lyrics). The song’s of course more than schmaltzy enough for the occasion but it is actually not that bad. And all of a sudden we all started singing it. We had all heard the song countless times and had been forced to learn the lyrics more than once for school recitals. It wasn’t this big emotional singing, at least not at first nor all along. It all started as some sort of joke but the song has a definite mood. And it was good to sing it.

Much less known (at least here in Mexico) is Los Churumbeles’ Cariño Verdad (lyrics), which, again, and this is perhaps inevitable, is guilty of sentimentalism, but it is all drown in some fantastic music. I didn’t even know what the song was about for a long time, always mesmerized by the tune alone.

Oh and one more song: Gloria Trevi’s^WP thankfully-breaking-the-maudlin-mood A la madre, which was actually quite an innovative, playful song back in the time.

btw, I came from the party with a cool CD Faby lent me: Rhythms del Mundo | Cuba. I had heard one of their songs thanks to Chef and it was very intriguing. The project describes itself as a “collaboration of Western artists and the Buena Vista Sound” (as if Latin America wasn’t Western) and the results are oddly arresting (Latin America appropriating the outside world!). It’s pop made salsa. It doesn’t always work wonders but it is always worth hearing. The two best tracks in my opinion are Coldplay’s Clocks and Maroon 5’s She’ll be loved. Check them out.

Edgar, far right. Late high school.

Early Saturday morning he was driving back home when he crashed with a light post and a tree. His body almost unscathed (so much so he was a perfect organ donor candidate), his head suffered massive trauma. Yesterday he died. So fragile, so stupid a death.

We knew each other since middle school, when we hung out often. We often did projects together and were at each other houses several times. He was frankly a weird guy, always strangely bothering girls, always quirkily, somewhat affectedly hyperactive. But underneath that you could talk to him and he would listen. And he was always smiling. They started calling him “Tope” (speedbump) back then, I don’t exactly remember why, but I always thought the later “Bamm bamm”^WP, which never quite caught on, was much more fitting. I always called him Edgar, for me “Tope” was the bumbling school persona, Edgar—Edgar Quirarte Munguía—was the keen, sensitive friend I glimpsed occasionally.

We then went to the same high school, where he stayed afterwards and majored in Computer Engineering last December. We met less often in the bigger high school and only rarely at college. Last time I got hold of him he was in the Netherlands but he arranged for her mother to give me the photo CD (that he had compiled for our graduation) with which I started this Flickr high school pool.

So he became for me one of those background people you ask for at parties or hear from mothers or expect to casually meet one day or perhaps, sadly but unconsciously, expect never to hear again. And yet, happily and just as unconsciously, you also expect them to live out lives, to love, to be happy—and you’re happy just to take them for granted, to have them glowing from afar.

Didn’t know what to do at his wake. Postponed the whole thing as long as I could. Angry, that such a stupid thing still happened. That we are still so fragile. That he was just starting to live, just majored. He liked doing websites, we might have worked together. He was always doing some strange business or other, we might have ended up doing something together. He liked hanging out with teachers, they adopted him. He was a good man, the youngest son, impossibly tall, childishly handsome. He may have been DUI that morning, so what? It’s still so stupid. Still so senseless.

I know now what I’m going to do. In Eliezer Yudkowsky’s spirit^ELZR, I’m donating a 100 dollars to the Singularity Institute, a fledgling organization to confront both the opportunity and the risk of a(n A.I.) singularity. They’re currently in the midst of a Matching challenge and a group of donors will match your contributions dollar for dollar until July 6th.

I remember my astonishment when I chanced on Marvin Minsky’s queer idea that there was nothing special about the 21st century for it to be the birth of a singularity—we could have been there by, say, 300 CE; centuries ago at any rate. We should have been.

So I’ll donate a 100 dollars today. And the next stupid time someone close to me dies I’ll donate 200. And 300 the next time. And so on. Till it’s over.

It has taken me some three years to realize it but when I did it was obvious. The crazy sleep schedule I’ve been riding since I dropped out of college is more than the pale-hacker tropism for long quiet nights. It’s more than manic-depression, which for a time I was sure of having. It’s more than youthful immaturity, which I’m sure of having.

I remember the first nights out from college, and some before, I would curl up on my bed, scared as I’ve ever been—fingers curled, fetal, with hamsters in my head and a stomach full of nothing, churning away anyway. Scared of what you say? Oh, the usual I guess, scared of failure, of success, of not being up to the challenge, of blowing it all away in search of some silly dream. Mostly, though, scared of this fear I knew not inside of me.

Those nights stopped without my realizing but I now know what happened to them: I tired them away. I would work (or idle) my way to exhaustion, till there was nothing left for me to do but tumble down. Sleeping was sure easier than facing my fears, and since everything could wait, what was the harm of sleeping on it? Again and again.

A weird happening today, a phone call, has got me paralyzed and deep in soul-searching. In my rambling thoughts I remembered Dragon Ball, my all-time favorite story as a child. You know, one of the most magical things of this most magical anime, perhaps even its central theme, is how almost every enemy, minor or major, eventually becomes part of the gang, a friend and perhaps even a wife or a husband—there’s Oolong, Yajirobe, Tenshinhan, Chaozu, Kuririn, Android 18, the Ox King, Yamcha, Piccolo, Vegeta, Majin Buu, and even Mr. Satan, but I’m sure I’m forgetting many.

Let’s see if it works.

I remember being completely, utterly floored when reading in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson about how, at bottom, supply and demand are one and the same.

Yes, it was obvious. Ridiculously obvious. But I had never realized it. A whole semester of economics in high school plotting gratuitous graphs and fondling equations for what? They should have put this in big, bold black letters at the very first class and let us go afterwards. My twenty something dollars per hour would have been far better employed.

But yesterday I stumbled on Wikipedia’s trade pedia and realized, mind blown, I had only scratched the surface of it. It only took the first, luminous paragraph. (Its scary how good Wikipedia is becoming.)

Buying and selling are concepts that only acquire meaning when we bring in money. At its essence, trade (barter), is fundamentally reciprocal—providing no ready way to distinguish between its participants.

So simple and yet so deeply buried by mindlessness. Don’t forget it and watch countless everyday fallacies come tumbling down, naked.

(Notice also the definition of market: “a mechanism that allows trade”—a mechanism that allows for voluntary exchange. There’s untold beauty and nobleness in free trade.)

Making posters has been a hobby of mine since I can remember. At high school I tried to start a series of posters on moral values but only finished one on gayness and another on licentiousness. At college, I made one on Esperanto and several for the cinema club I ran with some friends.

This one, my latest, is about the Jicama fruit^WP and it plays on a joke by Friends’s Chandler: “Cheese. It’s milk that you chew.” The funny thing is that for Jicamas it’s almost true, from the fruit’s pedia: