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.