Arriving late...a lesson on human nature

My yester-day started quite well. Although I had an early wake up to wait for Adriana, which turned out to be another missed appointment in the series of many -partly due to her being Italian and partly to her being very busy with moving out-, I stayed in a good mood enjoying a long-awaited read, Herbert Marcuze's "One-dimensional man", (recently downloaded from a great site which I strongly recommend
http://www.marxists.org/reference/). Around 10am I had to go, in order not to miss Charles' seminar about his dear selenoproteins and so there I was, with Readiohead's "Reckoner" cunningly finding its way through my inner ear, right to that special spot where a big concentration of neurons triggers the excretion of high levels of endorphine (or at least this is what reductionist neurophysiologists want us to believe). I got my bike and rushed down Avinguda Litoral only to find out that for some strange (?) reason all the "bicing" stations where full, meaning I had no place to drop off my rent-by-the-hour bike.

Such a situation is not that uncommon of course, but it became one such when the waiting time for an empty spot on any rack in a radius of 500 meters around work gradiently increased to 15, then 30 and eventually 55 minutes! Over this -under different circumstances short- period of time, my mood suffered a correspondingly gradient decline as I quickly passed from feeling superb to just nice and then from slighlty pissed to furious. My mp3 player was there to accompany this emotional decay and so Radiohead swiftly changed to Tori Amos, then to Tom Waits, only to boil down to Prodigy's "Smack my bitch up" in full blast as I ran towards an empty spot, at last, after waiting for almost an hour and with the seminar almost over.

In spite of all that, I 'd like to consider myself a positive person, who can get something out of even the most unpleasant situations. In this case -obviously influenced from my reading of Marcuse- I tried to turn my anger outside in and introspect a bit. Why was I pissed? Because a service I have paid 6 euros a year for was not working properly. But this happens with services that are far more expensive. And why was I being mean? Why was I suddenly developing a deep dislike against every person I could see placing his bike on the rack? Wasn't he one more like me, that had a seminar to attend or a meeting to make it to? It was just because THEY would make it and I was still stuck there. It seems that every service that is not designed well quickly becomes a pain simply because it turns into being competitive. And I am probably not the first to point out that competitive systems are the safest way to bring out the worst in human nature.

So there I was, listening to "Invitation to the Blues", reflecting about human nature, competition and the lost challenge of altruism. Because I have grown to believe that for the disgusting creature man is (lets not put women into this yet), altruism and solidarity remain challenges. I also came to the safe conclusion that even in the midst of the universe's uncertainty there were still things to be classified as absolute certainties and one of them was that I was definitely going to walk home in the evening.

As midnight found me in Barceloneta riding my "bicing" back to the Gotico a new certainty arose. And that is that there is no such thing as a safe conclusion.

today

"...pobres diccionarios, que tienen que gobernarse ellos y gobernarnos a nosotros con las palabras que existen, cuando son tantas las que todavia faltan..."

Jose Saramago
Las intermitencias de la muerte

The colour magenta!

I was just informed that T-Mobile are in a legal fight against some Dutch brands on the use of the -otherwise ridiculous- colour Magenta, on which they claim to have the copyright. In plain words they claim the exclusive use of this colour, meaning that all you designers, graphical artists and painters out there should be very cautious in your choice of colouring or you may be in trouble.

As a subliminal form of protest -and after apologizing for any visual problems this may cause- I inform you that the background of the blog will remain ridiculously MAGENTA until the next post!

Having quite a few friends in the graphical arts business, I am aware of colours having been named after the "discoverer" of their particular wavelength. So I know there is a "pinish" green called Veronese, a dark red called "Tiziano" and I am very fond of "Klein blue". Until thirty minutes ago, I had a strong disdain for Magenta, but just the thought that I may soon no be able to use colour code #FF00FF suddenly puts me in the place of Eve in front of the forbidden fruit!

I am getting the urge to recite the most quoted phrase in this blog -that is "jokes aside"- but I cannot. Simply because I am now completely convinced that if there is something out there more ridiculous than the colour magenta, it must be without any doubt the laws of the market that allow some people to consider that they can put a copyright on a colour. I guess next Nike would like to patent curved lines, McDonalds will impose restrictions on the use of the capital "M" and RJ Reynolds Tobacco will claim exclusivity on representations of camels. Apart from the serious problems this is bound to inflict on painters specialized in desert landscapes, it may only mark the beginning of an era , when this blog would be highly expensive to maintain (given the combination of a Magenta background and 7 capital "M"s up to this point, not to mention the curvature implicit in Times New Roman).

I would therefore like your attention here. This blog is staying online just because of an inherent tenacity against ridiculous ideas put forward by extremely bored company lawyers, anxious to justify their incredibly high salaries. Support our cause and keep Magenta free!

Departure Bay

I had to wake up early today, it's Wednesday and group meetings start at 9.30. As I walked through the morning mist, on the way to the lab, I was mostly thinking on stuff other than work. Yesterday's concert or what Borges would say or write about iPods and Kindles. As I watched the grey breaking waves on the beach of Barceloneta under the sounds of "Closing Time", utterly distracted from anything relevant of a working day just about to start, I felt a bit guilty.

Then the meeting started and finished, we had lunch, got back up, still trying not to be distracted anymore but it so turns out that distraction is the natural order of things. It becomes clear when right there in the midst of all the work you can't do, the daydreaming you can't avoid and the guilt you cannot get over, that you get a phone call bringing you back to earth. Then you forget all about guilt, you feel all work is futile and oblige yourself to daydreaming, realizing that at the background of all your plans and endeavors, life still goes on and most of the time it goes on the hard way.

I find it so hard now to think of Tom Waits explaining "Closing Time" or what Borges would say to someone losing a beloved father, since writing about death may be one thing but one's loss is something completely different. You try and try to put yourself in your friends shoes, hoping to be able to share the grief, thinking -in rigorous math logic- that sharing automatically means lessening the burden. But it's not like this at all, since death defies all logic and can only cast unequal shadows. And one's mourning is a solitary torment. All the rest of us can do is wait until the departure fades at the back of the mind and the good times are fossilized in memory as tokens of something beautiful that -like all that is beautiful- has come and gone.

So "shiver me timbers, 'cause I am a-sailin' away"

This modern love

A winter cold in November cannot last in Barcelona and as from yesterday we are back to normal with the wind slowing down leaving the mist hanging in the air, Gaudi's lizards stretching in the sun once more. In the midst of all that we start another week with the same old problems and brand new hopes. Last weekend was great, having seen a very beloved one after an annoyingly long time and it must have been exactly for this -and perhaps the lack of Sunday night football- that made the transition much more difficult than usual.

Monday proved to be -deservingly- frustrating as I passed most of it trying to change some of my best -best meaning most scientifically deceiving- plots and diagrams from any possible format to another. I came home destroyed and tensed, wishing ALL scientific journals perished into oblivion, so the only thing I could do was to lay back with a glass of tsipoyro and get back to my reading while listening to Stan Getz and "Stella by Starlight". But as music, words, image formats and electronic submissions of scientific articles were twirling inside my mind a weird obsession started to take me over. I had just read about amazon's latest device, the "kindle", a sort of "iPod for readers" allowing you to store and read thousands of e-books, newspaper articles and entire blogs on a tiny, portable screen with wireless connection, which you can keep in the inner pocket of your jacket. on the other hand, the thought of getting me one of this cool 160G iPods that could actually carry all the music I have owned or listened to in my 30-year life was already harassing me over the last weeks. So there I was fantasizing about two small devices that could carry the only two things I allow myself to be fetishist about: my books and my CDs. A kindle carrying all my books, an iPod with all my music, enough power to serve them for life and I am set!

I stopped and pondered. Not long ago I was criticizing cell-phone nations from this same blog and there I was thinking about all these gadgets that become obsolete before you even get to owe one of them. Then I just realized that during this daydreaming I had completely forgotten about "Stella by Starlight" and that my eyes were simply mechanically scanning lines in my real-paper book (actually it is Giuseppe's but still) in a process that was far from qualifying as constructive reading.

I woke up today and got out of bed with extreme difficulty. In fact there is a good chance I 'd still be there if it had not been for Bloc Party (on my faithful old and crappy mp3 player) and "This Modern love" that kept me up and going while riding the bike to work, thinking about all this modern gadgets that do so well in feeding our obsessions but very often tend to obstruct us from the real thing.

sick but not tired

Over the last two weeks, I have gone through a serious attack of mucus of the most malicious kind that left me mostly inept for more than half of the days. This has fortunately helped me sleep in high pitch dreaming frequencies, allowed me to work at minimal -almost subsidence- levels and left me enough time to think, an activity which is widely known to be highly suppressed among members of the scientific community.

As in most cases -and as Borges would have been delighted to reassure the small readership of this blog, if only he was alive and bothered to do so- most of the things one thinks about have already been said or somehow expressed already. My -rather un-original- questioning can be no exception to the above rule. Therefore I can redirect the doubtful reader to the previous post where my dear Gustave (in the form and shape of a 19th century Diogenes) is cynically at his best!

Over the last days I have suffered meetings with (demanding) scientists, talked to (highly demanding) editors of (highly rated) scientific journals, anticipated the (un-dubiously defined as being all about "fun and money") talks of hot-shot researchers. All of the above -rather diverse but the least divertive activities- steered me on for some additional thinking. And as every activity, when undertaken by a scientist -or at least one who is being paid to behave as such- they had to boil down to some conclusion, which they did with no great complication. And it so turns out that listening to Queens of the Stone Age, watching "Dr. Strangelove" for the 5th time, re-reading some of Saramago's finest irony (re-written by him so that it is re-read as Borges would again assert had he bla-bla...) and -last but not least kicking- a ball around with some friends up in Mundet, are FAR more important, meaningful let alone amusing and mind-soothing than most of paper preparations or scientific talks. And that my dear Watson is a fact!

Over the next days I have to devote most of my time to prepare a manuscript for submission, which means a series of "self-improving" tasks such as changing format in references, adjusting image size and drafting a cover letter aiming at convincing, not mentioning impressing the editor that two years' work has been no waste and can be of virtual interest to him/her. It may prove to be so, since he or she (already so busy with other people's submissions) may not have yet submitted to the charms of either Saramago or Queens of the Stone Age. But as long as this humble submitter is concerned, the die is cast and nothing can convince me that these "self-improving" tasks are improving this self in any other level than the one of strengthening me against mental torture.

That I am still questioning all that, means I may be still sick (only without the mucus) but not tired. And that my dear Watson is yet another fact.

Sadly, deductions from these facts remain, still, elusive.

today

Science: Un peu de science ecarte de la religion et beaucoup y ramene

Baccalaureat: Tonner contre!

Gustave Flaubert
Dictionnaire des idees recues

today

"...Πώς έγινε με τουτο τον αιώνα και γύρισε καπάκι η ζωή
πώς το φέραν η μοίρα και τα χρόνια να μην ακούσεις εναν ποιητή..."

Μάνος Ελευθερίου
Μαλαματένια λόγια