Sorry, we're open!

Hello world,

I have decided to come back online to seek catharsis. You see, I have been recently appointed Investigador Titular A at the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE). I am a newbie to the rat race of tenure track positions so I did the most stupid thing I could have thought about: Start developing old ideas, trying to collaborate with well established researchers, get a couple of students and, basically, try to publish or perish... Bad idea.

Why, would you ask. Well, it happens that I am also getting married next May.

In short, I have put myself in the most crazy situation I have ever put myself into in my life. Now, I am co-responsible for two doctoral students, teaching a graduate class, trying to publish some papers, searching for a good idea to write a grant due to the end of February, taking care of a friend's house, traveling to and fro for wedding matters, and screwing up things now and then.

For example, I just realized I got an awful typo in the last equations of our latest prepint! I completely forgot to type the interaction terms! 

Sooooo...

It's time to keep doing what I have done all this time, Prepare lectures a week ahead, try to finish projects well ahead of deadlines, and add some rules like fixing a precise hour for meetings with the doctoral students and working at most with two research projects at a time. Also, I need to let go and that's why I'm back.

Sorry, we're open!

Vacations... what do to with them?

I never know what to do with my vacations. I usually never take them and I usually get bored after a few days or even hours whenever I have to take them without having something in mind

Waking up late... check

Cleaning the house... check

Watching a movie while having breakfast... check

Chat with Lyx... check

Get bored and checking the arXiv, physics and optics journals for new papers... check

So, you see. I can even bet that before the day is gone I will be doing a little bit of algebra here and there now that I found something that caught my eye in today's listings at the arXiv.

Days off, those I can handle. It is easier to think of 18 waking hours to do whatever you want: sit at home to read a book, go downtown to take some photos, go to the cinema, all of the above. Vacations, well, vacations for me used to mean getting a one-month train pass and hop from city to city coach surfing at my friends' places for three or four days at a time; getting into the car alone or with family/friends and drive for a whole full month to hidden places; or grabbing the backpack, meet my friends at some interesting and wide area with hitchhiking and backpacking potential and spend a full month moving around the place trying to get to know it. Now, that requires a little bit of planning but not really that much, in the end you just have to figure the general area that you want to visit and that's all.

Today is the first day of my 28 day vacation. I'm supposed to be off the office until February 29th. and I have no clue what to do with it. I'm just taking the days because I cannot cash them in before my contract ends the 3rd of March. I have just one vague idea of what I want to do: Angkor Wat but that's it. I wish Lyx, Andre or Martin where here to just go over a place and start moving around until there's no Wat  left un-sighted or pagoda un-visited from Vietnam to Singapore—uhm, maybe that's way too much—.

Anyway, I'm too lackadaisical to get the visas to Vietnam and Cambodia. Most probably I will start doing my typical working day routine to overcome this ennui.

If you are looking for information about what countries require a visa for Mexicans, I found in the intertubes was this page that is photographically organized and this page that is alphabetically organized.

If you know about some beautiful place (not a beach!) in South Pacific Asia that doesn't require Mexicans a visa to travel there, please post it in the comments, I will be thankful.

Hope

And, then, the day came,
when hope, now, didn't fade.
Instead, at first sight of delusion,
it stayed, strong and fueled,
by the same illusion
that destroyed the past

The cobblestones (2005)

"Love doesn't exist," he said loudly to the new moon in the night sky. Slowly, his drunken steps took him away from the hlavná namestie. The outer rim of the staré mesto, with its tower gate, surprised him whispering to himself, "nevertheless, I wanna believe it does." A world away the girl he wanted to believe he loved was probably sleeping, trying to solve her own troubles.

It was a good day, why not? After the rain, the sun always shine the most, and the skies are the most beautiful shade of blue. "Such is life", he thought, "after the dark of the night the light of the day comes, once and again."

The stride built up momentum, and then he found himself walking with a smile on his face, and a proud stance on his body, "nevertheless, I wanna believe it does", he said to the cobblestones of the road.

The bus

She came in a hurry into the bus, a mess of boxes and bags. It took him a second to stand up and offer his seat to her; politely, she declined; gentlemanly, he asked again; honestly, she accepted. They crossed words, just a few. What came in excess, flooding the bus with the warm of kindness, were disguised smiles and stares...

The nightly ride...

It begins against a pinkish background; the sun is about to leave the sky. The students, here and there, some calmly others noisily, process slowly down the hill; a living flux. Tsing Hua is never empty, but always peaceful. The road turns into a trail; it is now when the nightly journey really begins.

An undefeated steep segment stays victoriously, it is possible to hear it whispering a welcome back in the gust. The wind stays, the steep slope's way to encourage those riding; don't give up... Just a few meters more... You will do better the next time...

The rest of the trail is silent, respectful; the ghostly walkers too; it is possible to smell the silence, to feel it crawling on the skin, to taste its herbal flavour, but hear it.

The night has come; the dark sky vault can be seen as the bamboo canopy is left behind; stars are hidden beyond our polluting photons, dreaming about that time when they could see those tiny beings that manage to hide their lives from them behind a resplandecent courtain.

Now it is possible to hear the silence, it croacks! Splashes! Flaps its dark wings on the sky and screeches!

When words are not enough.

There comes a time, when the words of our own mother tongue are just not enough. The words may exist, surely they do as Spanish has a LARGE vocabulary, but lack the deeper impact attached to the foreign words though its own culture or just the personal experience...

Geceleri resmine baktım, olanları anlattım. Seni bir görsem diye diye (...) Okuduğum her cümlede, konuştuğum her insanda, gördüğüm her güzellikte, sen de varşın, sen hep varşın

Geçmişe duyulan özlem, birtanem.

It may be I got older; I got the Saudade.