"Look! That is the most beautiful color of tiles I've seen!" I exclaimed to Capuchi as we were exiting a subway station in Kyoto. "Why can't we have this color in the New York Subway?" Our guess was that in New York functionality rules over aesthetics, or even beauty. After spending some days visiting Japanese Buddhist temples I reaffirmed the idea that beauty and good design is not, neither has to be, superficial. Form is meaning coming to surface and the environment shapes your state of mind and being. "For a strange reason, we usually don't have good design in America", Capuchi concluded after taking my picture by the lilac-tile wall.

"Did you ever imagine we were going to be drinking a beer in Japan?" Capuchi asked me as we had dinner in Nagoya with partners from the Pacific Island States.

I didn't. Not even in my wildest dreams.

There is a giant water-bug in my bedroom but I'm too tired to even try to kill it. I started packing for Japan and still need to read a few scripts before going to bed and certainly before a meeting with the Alabama team tomorrow morning. I told my psychologist that life sometimes feels like a roller-coaster where new events keep happening one after the other without time to digest, reflect and fully absorb them. Victor came to visit last week; we went to a Roger Waters' concert, a half-marathon in Staten Island, a few dinners, brunch and spend some time staring to the ceiling in silence. Quality time. I also got promoted last week, opening the opportunity for growth and brining new challenges at the professional level. Doin' Time from Sublime is playing on Pandora, and as the with experience of watching Pink Floyd's The Wall live last week, it reminds me of where I came from, why I took certain life decisions, and how much I have grown in the past 10 years. Things, and we, do change.

I'm laying on bed recalling the ad-hoc party we organized at the grocery store in Anolaima, Colombia last week. We were back from an activity where the production team and actors of the radio drama collaborated with local authorities to clean a nearby community. The production team is very diverse, farmers, youth, local politicians, community leaders and children. We were all tired but nevertheless found a pretext to have a beer, dance to salsa and vallenato, celebrate the success of our cleaning efforts and the progress of the radio drama production. I had the chance to dance with Felipe, an eleven-year old boy from a nearby community who is by far my favorite child in the whole world. He is astonishingly smart, positive, and has the common sense of an octogenarian that has gone through it all. If I could make a bet on someone, he will be the one.

I'm now back in New York after working ten days in Colombia and spending the last few days with Santiago in Bogota. It is awesome to know that some friendships keep growing ad evolving even with time and distance. I'm also back in my house and bed after more than two weeks of couch surfing. There is still lots of fine dust all over and it will take a while for my room and house to look homey again.

Pieces of Bogota

Eating almojabanas and drinking panela after Sunday church.

Rainbow after a rainy afternoon as we drove to Usaquen.

Santiago's animation project, El Pequeño Tirano, on sale at local bookstores.

Daniel and I are watching the US Open men's final match between Nadal and Djokovic as we wait for Belen to arrive; her flight should be landing around 10:30 pm. I've been couch surfing for the past four days, and will continue to do so until I leave to Colombia on Friday. I feel bad for Belen as she'll be forced to couch surf with me even when she'll be getting the true New York-chaotic experience. "There is an age when couch surfing is no longer fun," Jorge told me during our production meeting today. My house is a mess, so I rather swallow the shame to ask my friends to host me for a few days. Holes in the walls and ceilings, and fine dust covers every surface. Last night as I was riding the subway to Capuchi's house carrying my bags wet from the rain and covered in white dust, I smiled to a man carrying a fishing pole and a bucket full with fresh fish he had just caught in Long Island City. New York is the kind of place where you can never go wrong; there will always be someone odder than you getting all the attention.

A box of matches

For 56 years Fidela has cooked for the family at my grandmother's house in Mexico City.

She has lived by the stove as we have all grown older and some of us have travelled far.

But the sound of a shaking box of matches always brings me back to her, getting ready to cook.

We are so many things, we are so many people. I once heard that there was no such thing as an original idea, and I think what we call original ideas are the abstractions to the accumulation of collective knowledge. So again, we are the accumulation of our experiences, of the people with whom we shared. We all shape one another. Arvind always says that relationships have longevity, and they do, not only we keep growing with the people around us, but we carry the knowledge and teachings of others within ourselves. Someone left a comment to my previous post with a mention to the concept of chocomilkconhuevo (which literally – and oddly - translates to milk chocolate with an egg). Chocomilkconhuevo was a good-humored code my friends and I used to refer to our way of thinking, which was considered strange for the conservative standards of Guadalajara. I’m not sure who left the comment, but it reminded me of some of the stories that lead me to where I am now. A few months ago Agatha, who lives in Cyprus after being my roommate for 3 years, sent me an article on friendship published by the New York Times. The author stated the importance of relationships where the question of worth does not even arise. The willingness to be there, without any expectation of an exchange for pleasure; true friendships are not investments; they don’t exist for what they will bring in the future. To be a friend is to step into the stream of another’s life.

It is past midnight and Troy, Marcelo, Oscar and I are in the living room drinking wine around a candlelight as we wait for the electrician to come and fix our electricity. Troy and Marcelo are making our Thanksgiving plans and describing deep-fried turkey and green-bean casserole. Do you like okra? What about collards? "How do I write collard greens?", I asked Troy. "If you are quoting me, you can say I said 'collards', that's what we call them." In the meantime, the electrician has come with the bad news that it is not a fuse problem but a failure in the whole wiring system, which means we won't have electricity tonight, or not even tomorrow. We could all sleep in the living room. Camping in.

. . .

"I like your blog", Josefa exclaimed to my surprise over brunch yesterday. I don't consider myself a writer or an artist, but knowing that what I write connects with others' experience gives it a greater meaning. We had a long conversation about life-changing decisions, love and work from a gender perspective. "I think it is our responsibility to show a new role model for the women coming behind us, the new generations", she said. "Some people say you can't have it all: work and a family," she continued. "Why not?" I interrupted without knowing the answer. Yesterday was Josefa's birthday and she felt like walking around Soho before meeting with friends to let the hours go by as we drank bottles of prosecco at a bar in the West Village.

. . .

"What date is today?" Troy asked, "it is my New York anniversary; I've been here for 14 years." We all sigh to the idea of time passing by so fast. "I reckon I'll be here for a 'coon's age'", Troy says with a Southern accent that rarely shows.

Yellow Flowers

I've been always fascinated by how life and beauty blooms even in the most harsh circumstances. It is in a way a certain kind of resilience, a genuine manifestation of adaptation and survival. In Mexico City, even as polluted and populated as it is, you'll always find yellow flowers blooming in between the concrete blocks on the sidewalks. In the same way, you'll always meet people that have managed to find joy in what appears to be hostile routines. "I love cinema, artistic films and reading science fiction," a taxi driver told me as he drove me from Condesa to Polanco in Mexico City, "I read during traffic lights, and take advantage of the long hours I spend stuck in traffic". Ten years ago my mother, grandmother and me made a road trip in search of our roots in Jalisco. We drove to Platanar, a small village two hours away from Guadalajara that came into oblivion when a highway was built destroying its plantations and making it impossible for drivers to drive through it; or even know of its existence. Manuel, my grandmother's cousin, still lived there and took care of his parents, who must have been almost a hundred years old. They lived in a house in ruins, most of the ceilings where long gone, and the interior patio of a once colonial house was covered with fallen walls, bricks, oxidized pieces of metal and long-stem wild grass. I was surprised to find out that Manuel appeared content with his life, and even more so to discover that he could easily talk about black holes, fractals or bio-technology. Everything he had done all his life was to read every single publication that made its way to Platanar; this included years of volumes of Selection of Reader's Digest. Nobel Prize writer Wole Soyinka spent 27 months in jail before fleeing his native Nigeria to the United States. He was denied access to books, paper and ink so he tried to remember every possible mathematic equation to keep his mind alive. These stories remind me of one of my favorite movie scenes from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: I survived because I held to my own humanity. That's all I could do because that is all I had. Like you. Cling to your own humanity and you'll survive. Like yellow flowers blooming from concrete blocks.