Merigoesaround

...want others to marry. Yes, this is a big statement. Married couples enjoy having married friends to do married-couple kind of things. And if you have dated somebody for long, way too long, married couples might think that you should marry. Soon. Marrying, like crying, is contagious. Also yawning has this feature.

I am reading that the state of Massachusetts has the highest per capita health spending in the US. I like to be in places with loads of hospital. It reinforces the sense of bubble and it is perfect for health-conscious individuals like myself. However, when you are surrounded by three major hospital with hundreds of beds you wonder if America's health commercialization does any good to this society or just makes them (us) all pill and doctor consultation addicts. My friend Kirs was hospitalized yesterday. She will be fine in a couple of days, nothing serious. I am not worried about her stay at the hospital...it resembles more to a sanitarium than to a place where people are in pain. In her individual, private lavatory, air-conditioned room there is a welcoming board saying "Welcome. Today is 24th of January". The hospital offers room service, there is a restaurant-like menu over the bedside table offering vanilla ice-cream, caesar salad and filet mignon. Besides Kirstin...

Life is negotiation. We negotiate when to go to the cinema, which movie to watch, we negotiate where to go on holiday with our partner, what to cook for dinner, when to start a job... The year started with a 2-week intensive workshop on negotiation and conflict resolution. I tend to have intellectual crushes with professors, which again I did. Professor Mandell is probably the best professor I've ever had. The level of caring for his students is unmatchable, his excellent organization and interesting, well-picked materials all seasoned with the darkest sense of humor in Cambridgean territory made this seminar a once in a lifetime opportunity. Last semester I had another crush on Linda Bilmes. But Linda deserves a posting by herself. In the workshop I suffered many and very different identity transformations. I represented the Unions and fought for a salary increase, better job incentives and more worker's involvement in productivity decisions. I was an NGO in the Middle East su...

This posting does not make justice to the very intense last 2,3 weeks I've had...but I did not want to miss the opportunity to write the last posting of 2007 and to wish you good health, an intense love life and some money to enjoy materialistic pleasure. Muak!

Today I surprised myself with the thought that my grandma was born in 1906. Or sometime in those first years of the last century. She died 18 months ago. The truth is that when she had time to celebrate her birthday she was too old and she had forgotten the year she had been born. No official documents were available at the local council. I think I realized too late how important it is to find out more about our grandparents. I listened to endless adult conversation while I was a child. I liked to be among adults. However, I only started valuing the importance of knowing how life was during the 1930s, 40s....at the age of 17. Je regrette. My mum turned 57 today. She still has 2 or 3 decades of life ahead. Promise: I will listen to her stories about the 1970s and 80s and record them in my brain. One thing I am sure, my grandma would have never imagined in her long life her picture would be posted online.

"Would you like to be still in command of Russia?"- a student asked. "No", he answered, "my time is over". His biggest regret was not having been able to stop the disintegration of the Soviet Union. At the end of Gorbi's time, on March 17, 1991, 78% of all voters voted for the retention of the Soviet Union in a reformed form in a Union-wide referendum. The Baltics, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova boycotted the referendum. The rest is history...first the Baltics, then Hungary, Poland...and the Soviet Union died. However, the "old times were better" mentality still remains in today's Russia (same with a whole generation of Serbs who think melancholically about Yugoslavia). I kind of smell that melancholy on Mr. Gorbachev. Gorbachov said something paradoxical...thanks to the Soviet Union the European Union is what it is today!!! otherwise the EU would be composed of only 8 to 10 members. Well, thanks Russia for letting Poles, Hungarians et al j...

The dance floor converted into a swimming pool of crazy hormones smelling like hell The pastries were light green, pinky pink, yellow things The drinks small and expensive My friends were there. Hereby some Michele, Matthias and Milica. The four MMMMs!!!

Check these faces: Spain woke up today with the news that ETA had killed one civil guard and critically wounded another one. It is been a while since the last time ETA murdered somebody and I guess because of that I feel these deaths profoundly. The more I travel, the less identified with any nationalistic cause I am. I think what makes me so mad is the fact that some crisis in this world seem permanent to me... AND they should not be so!!!

I have: 5 email accounts (gmail first and foremost, hotmail, yahoo, Harvard, MIT) 1 blog I am of course on facebook 1 flickr account How much of my daily time is wired wasted?

May the Democrats flip flop this nation. Pls. Look at the feet of the ladies. How tasteless.

After a year and a half holding the back-to-school status, this semester I decided to take my first 'soft skills' class. Soft skill= cheap psychology classes. Hard skills=anything quantitative or academically solid. The choice is turning out to be a quite interesting cultural exchange. In my negotiation class at MIT I am learning how to negotiate with Americans, with Asians, with Europeans... The other day, in one of the exercises, I sold a land to a Korean student for $150.000 and I thought I had screwed him, "what a good deal", I told myself. Wroooong. It was just a so, so deal. Despite the poor communication skills of the Korean student, he managed to negotiate a price that was good for him. I thought, 'woao, I beated him'. Wrrrong. With Tao, another Asian students, things went much better...I sold him an old car for 3 times my minimum selling price. Americans are more conciliatory. They generally want to be nice. How overused the word 'nice' is in ...

I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

Life is this. 3.03 a.m. I am back from a farmer’s party. I was a cowgirl. Pictures to follow. I have to thank Santa Helena. I might call my daughter Helena. Let me elaborate. I went to the party with Francesco, one of my three roommates. We were in a hurry and took a cab. After the party, back home I realized that my cell was missing. It is something annoying to loose the cell, you loose those numbers that you care about, you loose the phone itself now you’ve learnt to like it, even if it is too big, too small, too cheap... We put the house upside down looking for the cell, thinking that maybe it was at home, under a cushion. After 30 minutes I had a moment of craziness and decided to go to the street and look for a yellow cab. That’s all I remembered. The taxi was yellow and the taxi driver was from the Middle East. I walked down Brattle and I crossed the local police guys. They told me “hey, cool cowboy boots”. I explained to them what had happened and they called a couple of taxi nu...

I asked my friend Luis. “So, tell me, why do you want to work for McKinsey?” - Because of the set of skills I will acquire - The money. I need to repay my loan - The name in my resume …Luis answered. He is a student from Peru studying at the Kennedy School of Government. Of Government, I repeat. What he did not tell me is that he had worked for the government for 3 years and he was disenchanted by what he saw.

Maybe because I am in the second year of my Masters one of the most popular topics of discussion among my friends is: how much do you think we are going to make when we graduate? Do you want to work for the good guys (the public sector, the NGOs, non-profits) or for the bad ones (McKinsey, investment banks)? Well, the(my) truth is that you can make more money than you need in both sectors. Another truth that some people do not yet see is that there are no bad or good guys, or, more specifically, you do not become a bad person if you work as a management consultant and earn a lot of money. The real question here is how much money do you need to have a confortable, normal life? What is normal? Am I going to be able to write this blog posting? The answer is NO.

Happy North Americans. Americans and Canadians appear to be the happiest people in the world. At least according to the satisfaction with life index*. The green and the blue colors indicate extreme happinest and the red loads of misery. The map supports my expectations. American society penalizes people that are negative or feel miserable. The customer service smile and happy voice is a must. Whoever is not feeling the joy of life can find it in an anti-depressant, mood-enhancer pill. Russians turn to be among the least happy people of the world. They also have their own home made anti-depressant, vodka, but it seems to be of limited effects. You can be happy if you try...and more important, you also need to suffer a little bit to recognize what happiness feels like. *Not sure how this is computed but shows the correlations between happiness and health

I was in the Public Speaking clinic of professor Danziger and a Finnish student found the courage to stand up and practice a mini speech, which is the purpose of this seminar. The Finn talked about the typical topical Eurotrash theme: why Europe is better than the US. After his speech professor Danziger said, 'Thanks. Every year a bunch of European students talk about this subject.'. I felt different While the Finnish student was belittling the US I was thinking, 'ok, I'll go next and explain why Europeans like or can learn to like the US'. I did not have time to intervene, but hereby some of the arguments I will use in next week's seminar: - European inaction in any international conflict. Yes, we do believe in soft measures, diplomacy...while we wait, the US acts. They go and eat the cake...while we haven't bought the ingredients to bake it. - Italian espresso is very tasty and sitting in a Roman terrace while sipping a coffee is unbeatable…but to walk hol...

It felt warm. I looked upstairs and I saw a black sparrow. It was not rain. No snowflakes in October either. A MIT sparrow shit on my hair. Yesterday was a really weird day until the black bird decided to popoo on me. First I lost my cell phone. I was already thinking that it is quite normal on me to loose things and strangely I had not lost anything for a while...when suddenly an American lady called my friend Ursula saying that she had found a cell phone. More than 3000 miles away, in Barcelona, same day, probably same time, my dad's cell phone was stolen. He was standing 3 metres away from his car, which was open. His cellphone was laying on the passenger's seat. Somebody took it from there in a matter of 30 seconds. This strange coincidence made me think that few people would have called had I lost my phone in Spain. The sequence of weird events did not end up there. I was in MIT to attend the International Development Fair, apart from some good ideas the Fair had a buffet....

Movie. 1998. From favorite Sunday evening family movie to...reality. Parent Trap was translated into 'Tu a Boston y yo a California' in Spanish. The story of two sisters who grew up in different places. My sister and I are grown ups...but I am in Boston and she'll be in California starting next June. Apart from the logical proudness I feel this message aims to convey more information than that. Grants, Schoolarships, Stipendium...I am proud of being a Spaniard in that sense (and it might be one of the few...). Spain offers a real chance to study thanks to grants, the number of public and private organizations allocating funds to help students like me, like her, like many, many others I know..to fill our brains with new ideas is enormous. And yeah, I have no indicator to prove that... Maybe I should ask la Caixa, our sponsor. They've been giving scholarships to study in the USA for 1/4 of a century...and guess what!? La Caixa is a Bank. A Catalan bank which uses part of ...

I'll do it tomorrow, I'll do it tomorrow, knowing tomorrow I won't do it. Maybe writing these short posting (while in class) I re-initiate my blog addiction. It is feeling good, feeling myself explaining my self.