One of the most satisfying and interesting pieces of literature I have ever read is a twofold manifesto concerning an important part of the Mexican language: its curse words.

Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize recipient for Literature in 1990, wrote a 30-page essay about the verb chingar — I guess the closest thing in English would be the verb “to fuck” — which happens to be one of the most insightful pieces of Mexican philosophy and psychology I know.

I read it together with Carlos Fuentes’ chapter on the same topic in La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz), for a high school class. Both of these literary pieces started what I would possibly call my language reformation.

For the first time this semester I decided to stop by the Ivy Room for lunch on a Friday. I wasn’t too impressed. Rather, my spinner needed some serious work to be remotely what it was last year. Has it ever happened that you get in a bad mood if you don’t eat what you expected? I’m sure you’ve had the feeling before. And the tables, though more practical, gave the place the look of a school cafeteria more than its old medieval bar look. All in all, I would not take visitors down there anymore. Tsk, tsk.