For the first time!

Today I saw my little nephew eating chocolate for the first time. After the first taste, he was so desperate to get some more... He reached fiercely for it whenever my brother took it away from him, and resumed devouring it when the bar was close to his mouth. The moment the bar disappeared from his sight, he cried furiously as if pissed off for not being able of having enough of that new flavor. It had been a while since I saw someone so berserk, letting the instinct take over. As an hedonist, I celebrated my nephew's first encounter with a pleasure that is not necessary to survive, yet completely addictive. The scene reminded me of all my first encounters with the things I love.
It reminded me of:
My first time in a roller coaster in Disneyland. I discovered that I loved speed, adrenaline, and improbable movements for a man, like going up and down.
My first time eating sushi, asking myself what was that combination of flavors that filled my mouth. I still praise the Japanese traditional food for having given me that moment.
My first time drinking wine, feeling how it spread through my system. My friends thought we were being rebel because we were drinking. I knew right away I had found a friend for a lifetime.
My first time wearing black converse. It feel as if barefooted, just the pebbles on the road did not hurt. It looked way cooler than barefooted.
My first time playing Final Fantasy. I started with FF VII. While I got into the story and the universe, I felt like I had found my favorite escape route from reality.
My first time listening to Lady Gaga. I knew the lyrics were crazy. "Where are the keys, I lost my phone" that sounded like me. It does not matter what happens, just dance! For many, that was the most stupid song; for me, it was a mirror of my philosophy of life. I keep "just dan[cing]"

And so I could go for hours on those many things that I feel like I need to live, to be happy. I wish I remembered my first encounter with chocolate. Was I as passionate about it as my nephew? Did I foresee right away that pleasure was what life was about?
Oh, those are definitely moments that make life worth living.

I don't know what I want

The Chinese girl in the counter asked me "what do you want"when she saw me rather lost in the alleys of the grocery store.

What a weird feeling when you just don't know what you want. Right, the guy who claimed previously knowing himself has to admit that he does not know what he wants at times. Or maybe I do know what I want, but I am too afraid of being unrealistic about my expectations.

Last time I had sex was not exactly like my ideal of a date, yet I got carried away. While in bed I lost the concentration several times. The thought of my head at those times was "is this what I want"? -- self awareness can ruin the party at times. It wasn't certainly all that I wanted. It was physical when I promised myself I would look for some romance this year, but it was hell of a too good game for just letting it go. It was what I wanted, just partially; that annoyed me.

This afternoon I was watching "Up in the Air" and the main character, Ryan Bingham finds a lady that shakes his principles of being the eternal single. This woman, Alex, agrees to be with him casually. This lifestyle seems to suit them both well until Ryan gets tangled in the love cruise and starts acting more like a boyfriend.
- "What do you want?" Alex asks. "Tell me what you want."
Ryan hesitates, unable to say anything. He grimaces and looks around, unable to speak.
- "You don't even know what you want." Alex concludes.

Sometimes, I'm just not consciously aware of what my desires are. I guess it is normal, and I hope it is transitory. For someone who tries to have his life all figured out, it just becomes ironic that this feeling of being lost is so strong right now. I feel like recording it to look back later and see what happened.

"What do you want?" - The Chinese girl asked. I knew she meant something different and that being rude was not her intention. I was a lost costumer, after all, and she was attempting, with her language limitations, to help me. Maybe if she had said "what are you looking for?" instead I would have answered "antihistamines" and we would have concreted our transaction. However, I felt the question as a confrontation with myself and as a recapitulation of the recent events, my room story included.
"I don't know" I answered and walked away without buying anything and feeling extremely uncomfortable.
Now I have to go again and get the cold medicine.

James Cameron should know...

... that there are threats like the one in Avatar everywhere you go. Human greed is such-- just there are not feline-like blue aliens; it is our environment, our flora and fauna against the same old two-legged enemy.

Last week, I went on a field trip to Crucitas, a community consisting on few shack-like houses, starving dogs, one school, and a Canadian open pit mining company. The streets of natural red ocher seemed rarely transited by humans. There's one path in particular that called our attention: the old road that divides the two lots of the company. This is the road we took. A guard was wary of our motivations and did not let go his radio transmitter. We had not gotten a hundred meters into the way, but the bosses at the mine should have been aware of our presence by then. "Environmentalists are here again, looking for trouble." We did not care; my whole group, about 25 students in their mandatory community service, kept walking and getting acquainted with the exuberance of the region, or at least what is left of it. As we advanced, our guides told us to watch the trees, to listen to the parrots and birds singing, and to imagine the huge impact destroying all that would do. The fact that an armed guard was following us at a prudent distance, reporting our position constantly, only makes the experience more intense and our indignation stronger. Sure, the company came with their tons of money, built a new road surrounding their lots and connecting the town with civilization, brought electricity, and promised heaven on earth to locals. What did our government do about this? bowed. The problem is not mining itself. The proportions of this project and its poor study of environmental impact just ring the alarm that nothing good can come out of this. They will drill 60 meters in the soil, extract the rock and wash it with cyanide to get the gold. With the underground currents of water running 75 meters down the earth (15 meters from the maximum depth of excavation) the hazard is way too high. The extraction of the gold would be performed in a huge pool of cyanide. As if all that did not sound toxic enough. (see the picture below with the sign? that's the space for the cyanide pool. All of it!)


The similarity with Cameron's movie is absurd. For ten years of gold extraction, the company would displace native species, the endangered green macaw for instance. They brought what is commonly conceived as civilization, but was not that what the RDA promised to the Na'vi in exchange of their land? Likewise, in both contexts the conflict emerges because humanity has given more value to a mineral over an ecosystem. Unfortunately, in Costa Rica there is no Turuk Makto to save the day, hardly any hero. If we do not stop this, it won't be just one hometree that we will see falling but acres of them.

Memories lost and found. 01. The Sewers

Before I had played any Final Fantasy or any action video game, I had already accumulated some miles in sewer diving.
Telling stories about my childhood is always interesting because they are unusual, hard to believe, and people think that I make them up. This time, the story is not about setting a hill on fire, jumping from waterfalls, or finding white bats in the palm tree of the backyard -- all of which I'll talk about in due time. This is me simply reminiscing about the time when in my neighborhood exploring sewers was the cool thing to do. It all started when I was around ten years old and the town hall decided that it was time to create a decent sewer system to deal with all the water that flooded the streets during rainy season. If you have ever been in Costa Rica, you know that it rains an awful lot. Now, I grew up in San Carlos, a region particularly blessed with the everlasting green scenery that just does not come out of the blue. My childhood town, in addition, is called Aguas Zarcas (Pristine Waters), and they were not kidding about the name just that they forgot to mention these waters run everywhere; only in my family's lot we had two creeks. Well, if the local government did not want all this water running freely, they had to build concrete sewers underground in several points. And so they did. My friend Lilliana (the sweet girl from my church who lived the closest to the center of the town) and I watched the construction process very comfortably from her house and swore that, once they had finished placing the huge cylinders, we would go and explore.
The construction of the sewers was done by the dry season of the following year. It rains all the time in San Carlos, but one occasional rain every two days did not flood the underground structure. The first invaders? Nope, they weren't the rats, which were rarely spotted in my town. Neither was the fungi or any kind -- and they mushroom fast! It was us, the kids on a radius of five hundreds meters lurking on the sewers that connected the center of the town with the local clinic and Lilliana's house. For us, grown up unaffected by the concerns of the mothers of this generation, the humidity, the lack of light, and the narrow spaces were the perfect elements for a new environment of adventure otherwise denied to us. We didn't know about risks or diseases. We would squat or walk like spiders if it was necessary, but we wouldn't let water ruin our adventure. Down there we were explorers, riders of the lost ark, fugitives: we were immortal. For the fragments of time that we could be alone with the echoes of our voices uttering the instructions on how to move, following a trace of dim light - cause we were too afraid of borrowing our father's flashlights, and getting our elbows dyed with the gray of concrete, the upper world stopped existing. We did not have the influence of the media telling us that we were a little bit too grown up for role plays or that we should live our lives around goodies and tv shows. Our friends at school have similar adventures themselves so we could go, talk, and share our daring pastimes. Ok, we encountered rats twice, but after running away from them, we got some sticks and went back willing to fight back for our territory.
Moss grew, time passed--we abandoned childhood. With the time, the sewers became Lilliana and I's place to talk, mostly. Boys started appearing in her life, and we traded the hideout for her romantic encounters with boys in the bridge above the entrance to the sewers. I went by myself a couple of times to our former underground fortress, but soon I decided to stop trying to revive old glories and to move on. I think that getting stuck twice also helped making up my mind.
Well, that's about my first entry on "lost and found" memories. I'm glad it hit me because I had totally forgotten about it. Whenever nice memories come to me again, I'll try to share them ASAP.

Introspection. Knowing thyself.

Introspection is written with "I" as in "Interpersonal" and as in "Isaac." So funny! I promise this was not premeditated.
I firmly believe that knowing oneself is the best tool to be successful in life. Insert cheap motivational talk here - No, not really. Talking out of joke, when the Greeks engraved the old aphorism of "Know Thyself" in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, they were giving humanity one of the few absolute truths there are. How often do we look into our souls? Before you continue, I should warn you! The following lines are most likely permeated with the kind of discourse that keeps you away from Paulo Cohelo.
Right, every series of thoughts I take the time to write here are triggered by some event. I feel compelled to talk about it so that the reader gets the bigger picture. As part of my mandatory community service, I need to attend lectures about environmental issues in Costa Rica so that we can go to communities affected by, let's say, water pollution, lack of water, open pit mining, among others. We address the issue in a room first, and then we go to the communities to talk about the problem so that the locals and the students can come up with a solution through dialogue. Well, today's lecture was about being honest with ourselves before we intend to go and talk to others. How convenient: an intrapersonal and interpersonal combo. The motivator used a system allegedly implemented in many countries of Western Europe called "The systemic constellation" (google it for further information.) As much as I would like to elaborate on that somewhat crazy method, I'm just going to say that it works using other people as elements in your life and locate them in physical places to give you an idea of how they are positioned in your brain. It sounds metaphysical and bananas, but the purpose behind it is the same as in meditation, as in reflection: Introspection.
As in many of the most fundamental areas of our lives, we know that the method is as simple as it sounds. Yet I have not met many people who take the time to detached from others and examine their lives. Someone who knows himself or herself well enough to see into others' lives can easily come and diagnose their problems. I have done it. I keep doing it, but whenever I talk about this, people most likely freak out. No, I don't read auras. Body language? Well, yeah, but the body and the mind are interconnected and often give away the other. I'm striving to get out of the abstraction here. Let's say I have located my strengths and weaknesses. I know my limits and live up to it. I'm sincere with myself and try to see the real "me" and not the ideal "me" - refer to Freud for the ideal self. Then, since I know myself truthfully, I can address people's issues from my own perspective. The conclusions I draw based on my observations are, in most of the cases, accurate. How do I do it? I create a web of possibilities according to my own insights and experiences. Well, "You can't know yourself that well" someone could argue. I don't want to brag about this, but I do know myself. I take every opportunity that life gives me to evaluate and triangulate my situation, as if I was my own research project. I often ask myself how do I truly feel about certain situation after it happens, what I could have done to feel better, what is the true reason behind my feelings, and so on -- the reasons might be shallow for I'm still a human, but if they are in fact the feelings behind it, I accept them and either embrace or work on them. Then, when I come to call my positive qualities, my demons, my dreams, and my fears by their real name, I can see them into others. It's like a challenge, my own personal puzzle that I can try to solve at any time of the day. It's interesting, rewarding, and more importantly, USEFUL!
Know oneself so that you can approach to others more effectively. I swear that if I had planned this post to be interrelated with my previous entry, it wouldn't have quite worked the way it ended up being. But, yeah! How can I build rapport in a community if I am struggling inside? Do people notice? How do they react to this?
There is not a infallible way to get to know oneself. Like every other form of negotiation process, internal dialogue consumes time and energy. You'll be never able to tell when you're there, but the endless possibilities that life gives you when you know yourself will hint that you're reaching your goal of self awareness! If I made you think about introspection for a minute, I might have accomplished my mission here (assuming that I had one.) At the end, figuring oneself out is a task that only the interested person can do.
It's just a thought, maybe a wish, that all my friends get to know themselves to see how far they make in life.

Interpersonal experience. My father's legacy

"Interpersonal" is written with "I" as in "Isaac". Such a thematic way to start blogging in English.

Talk with me for about an hour and I would have at least hinted how dysfunctional my relationship with my father was. I'm sorry for the people who lived in a picture-perfect family; I'm just not one of them! Wont ever be! And that, among many other things might make a distinction of me from the others, right away. Nonetheless, as tragic as that intro appeared to be, my father taught me two major life lessons that influenced my personality and that might compensate my difference from others. One has to do with money management and finances - my dad certainly loved the "kachin" sound even more than I do. The other contribution to him to my world was all the (by that time) developing theory of the interpersonal intelligence. Interpersonal, across people, from me to someone else and so on: one does not need to be a scholar to split the word and infer the meaning. Interpersonal intelligence, hence, is the ability to understand others and being able to interact with them efficiently.Theory is easy, isn't? It has always been. People rarely acknowledge that they are terrible listeners or too full of themselves to see into the others.
Right, right, this is when I come down to my father's lesson. He was an evangelical pastor, one of the very few that by the early 90s were aware that leading people takes more than only reading the Bible. He was hungry for secular knowledge as well, and I remember being five, going over his library while he typed his sermons in an electronic typewriter (go figure!) and listening to him going for hours about what researchers called interpersonal intelligence. "It is all about truly caring about others" he said. I idealized my dad back then so I'm unable to say whether he accomplished this principle or not, but the idea remained in my mind for sure.
So that's how I became a good listener, thanks to my dad. It would take me years to develop the skill of talking and being socially desirable and fitting - I'm being pretentious here, but I can't go on that just now. We have been told so often that we are social animals that it sounds cliche. Here is news: we happen to be social animals, and that's it. Go on, try to listen and talk to others and see how they respond. Based on my experience talking to people from many cultural contexts, I just can assert that it is an universal principle, almost like gravity. Add humor to your conversation, give your opinion if you can - that is relating as well, but keep listening. Pretend that you care might elicit the same affective responses for a while, but no one would believe in you after then. We're talking about people here, and they are the most precious material one can work with.
I find hard to think that theorist still classify interpersonal intelligence as one of the skills a human might or might not develop. As if the shaping of proper relationships were optional and not a choice. I'm not saying "befriend the world, forget your enemy, let's make love not war, blah blah." I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of people interacting with us daily. We find them nice, so why would it be so difficult to truly care about them?

So yeah, I'm not stalker. I was just paying attention to what you said.