Hi all, 12 years later (Part 2)

Hi again to my readers and my future self, 

 Continuing the story of what has been of me the last 12 years I haven't been writing.

2018: I realized more things that happened that year that I forgot to mention!

• My little brother got into my same school! It's crazy because to this day he does not realize how smart he is. He didn't do as well as me in school but did way better than me in the PSU and got in loosely. He started carpooling with me that year (convenient) and added some of his music to my pendrive (this meand I didn't get my new car until later, my bad, it's been a while) and I remember I learned (forcefully) some Naruto openings those mornings riding to school. Rafi would go on to fail more courses than I did.
• I got apendicitis and noticed during band practice for the Viña Festival in Bet-El. I started not feeling so good, drove alone to my house from Los Trapenses (the hill) and sad in the bathroom in pain. I remember telling my mom "it hurts here" *points to appendix" and being like "I feel like I need to poop and physically cannot". My mom sat in the bathroom for a while, saw I couldn't fully stand up straight and was like "hospital". We went and they said it's crazy I wasn't in more pain. They gave me painkillers and we spent the night and I got a week off school. My friends from college came to visit me. That was cute.
• That week was the deadline to apply to Tutores, a super exclusive club of students that acted as mentors for first years. I recorded a motivational video with my apendicitis face on. I did not get in. My friends did and that sucked. Also a "friend" insinuated I didn't have appendicitis, and that it was a facade for actually getting an abortion. This dude got kind of black-listed mentally for me after that.

2019: This is the first year I was TA in Desafíos (that first year course I mentioned about projects, design and innovation). I feel this was one of the first times I felt like an expert in my field. I loved it. I would go on doing this for 3 more semesters. This year I also did get into Tutores so I had a group of first years as mentees.

This winter I went to Israel (where it was summertime) with S, N and K for Taglit. It was very fun. Me and K stayed 2 extra weeks in Tel Aviv and this could be catalogged as wild time number 3. It was so fun to stay at a hostel, go bar crawling, meet people from around the world and visit beautiful places like the Kineret and Carmel.

The "Estallido Social" happened in October. It's hard to explain this. I remember I was having lunch and bumped into one of my mentees. She asked me like how do I feel about the news. I said I didn't know much about it. She said her dad is having a hard time because they keep raising the subway ticket prices and he has to use it for work every day. That was october 17th.

The next day we went to school but were told to leave early. At home watching the news, our everyday subway station (in front of the school in San Joaquín) had been burnt down. Classes were canceled the next day. More subway stations burnt down. No classes the next day, and the next. Watching the news was terrifying, especially because there didn't seem to be a good solution. The military had tanks out on the streets over the next weeks. Literally tanks rolling by my house like it's normal. School came back after 2 weeks virtually. We had online classes. That prepared us for what happend the year after.

2020: The pandemic hit. I remember I was skeptic at first. My mom was travelling, had a layover in the UK and said she was told to buy a KN95 mask. We had just started seeing news of the virus in Europe, but it seemed so far away. My mom didn't catch it then, but little by little we started hearing about it in Chile. School was canceled after 2 or 3 weeks of it. Back to virtual classes. Little did we know it would be for 2 years.

I remember right before this happened we started the school year with my friends, we were sitting at the place we always had lunch and made funny videos for our joke CAi (engineering student council) OE Cai joking about Corona. I had gone to J's to record some music just the week before the lockdowns.

I spent about a month locked in the house because I refused to wear a mask. After a while there was no getting out of it. I got a bike that year and rode (with a permit). We started having family lunches on the couch watching a show. We got through 

• The Office
• Man in the High Castle
• Jack Ryan

Maybe more that I don't remember.

That first semester of 2020 I was still a TA for Desafíos. It was weird doing it online. I also had gotten into choir class as an elective. That went well.

2021: Still going strong on that pandemic. I cannot beleive how long we were locked up! Seems crazy looking back. 2021-1 was the first semester some classes were OK to be hybrid I think. If not it was the second.

It was going to be a year since the pandemic started so this dude C from the year below us asked J if he wanted to help making a We Are the World video with students from all classes of our engineering school. J asked me to help out. I did.

That first semester I was crowned head TA in Desafíos. The song dude, C, was one of the TAs I would have in charge. He was hippy-dippy, long hair, very chill. Also extremely smart. Top of his class. He made the classes fun. We talked about music in the breakout rooms when the kids were working on their projects. Outside the Desafíos class, we became friends since we realized we had a bunch of classes in common. He helped me out a lot. 

Fast forward to end of semester, we recorded a music video together (also finally met in person) and things sort of clicked. It's funny thinking back how this happened even though we had curfew at 10 PM and no in person activities. We had each other in all social media and he did this thing where he was a different character in each of them, and each of the characters talked to me sepparately and talked shit about each other. We talked untill late hours and I wasn't getting bored. J gave me his blessing (I still wasn't sure). We started getting together more often and spoiler alert, haven't stopped ever since. 

We went to Pichilemu with G and her boyfriend D that october and he asked me to be his girlfriend. That semester he also helped me out in my classes. 

2022: This would be our last year in school. C was super smart so he graduated the first semester, I did the second. This year I went to Israel to play volleyball in the Maccabiah representing Chile. That was a really cool experience. I specially remember this date because I was taking a really hard class I was terrible at that semester and I had to leave for Israel before the grades were up. I failed the class with a 7 hour timezone difference. C and G made it their mission for me to pass, and miraculously they did it. Thank god.

At the end of this year I started my Trabajo de Título, basically I started working in a company to get my degree. I lasted 8 months untill 

2023: When I actually graduated. This job was awful. The people were great and the job was OK but my boss and my bosses boss had a secret relationship and were super unethical. I quit that job once I had my degree secured because they tried to get me mixed up in some suspicious shit. Today they have had a baby together and he no longer works there. She is in extended maternity leave.  G worked there since January of 2023 and didn't leave untill 2025. 

2024: C and I moved in together in August that year. Before this we each went to a resort vacation with our families. It was bittersweet, since it was kind of a goodbye trip. I was really sad the first months I moved out; I really missed my parents.

It was a small appartment in Warren Smith. The appartment was always warm and in the best location EVER. All birthdays were nearby, bakery and pharmacies in the corner. Work was walking distance. Near my parents' and his. I sold my Hyundai (I loved that car) and started sharing his (1 car is enough for 2). 

A month after moving in C and I travelled to Europe. [[]]]

Once we got back, I went to Mexico for work for 3 weeks!! This was so much fun. I had so many Tacos and Mezcalitas and got to know Ciudad de Mexico, Teotihuacán and Coyoacán during día de muertos! Amazing experience. 

We still did my birthday at my parents'. That was nice. We had an appartment shower (a few) and have (still) a whiteboard where our friends get points each time they visit us.

In october of this year my dad quit his corporate job. In november he got a job in Barcelona to be a CEO in a tech startup. In december my mom got her breast cancer diagnosis.

2025: This was not a great year. We started January in the OR. I slept there with my mom for her single mastectomy. She started chemo in february I think, and started losing her hair a few weeks in. This sucked. She was so sad. I wasn't living there and my dad was in Barcelona, so my brother covered for the most part. Also I was working, he was not. I'm very thankful he could be there. She finished chemo in June and started radio. After that she started rebuilding life.

In parallell at work I was promoted twice, I was doing great. This was a good place to focus energy while my mom was in treatment. C was a really good partner to have in all of this. 

In October I travelled with my grandma to Barcelona to visit my dad. It was a great trip. I was there for 3 weeks and had the chance to spend some time alone, think and walk. I worked remotely some days. Travelled with him on the weekends, to the Pirinees and Costa Brava and the South of France. He came to Chile in december. My mom got her last surgery at the end of that year and now has been focusing on getting better. 

Me, C and my brother R spent new years in Rio de Janeiro. 

2026: {year in progress}

Once we got back I got really sick to my stomach, it was awful. 

This year is going great so far. Dad moved back to Chile. Carrer wise going great: I did 2 talks (one for Friends of Figma in my office and one for Continuum, a tech consulting firm)  that in my opinion went really well. I feel like storytelling is something I do well and should do more of. Am motivated to keep pushing myself in that direction for the rest of the year and see what happens.

More news soon!

D

Hi all, 12 years later (Part 1)

Hi to my readers and my future self, 

It's been 12 years since my last post. Way too long and it feels all too familiar, like riding a bike. I feel like this blog is so cool, so the plan is to try and pick up where I left off. Disclaimer: I may not be as funny as I used to be, but who knows? Maybe something fun comes out of it.

In Chile we say "Hola po olvidona". I feel like this is originally from a YouTube video, I have no idea, but people say it to call out someone who has not done something they used to for a long time. A not so good translation would be: "Forgetful much?" Anyways, this is me calling myself out for not writing anymore.

I'm 28, going on 29. Oof. Let me go over an update of what has been up since 2014. That's around when I got back from Spain.

2015: Last year of school in Santiago. That year I sort of consolidated my real friends that were going to last up to adulthood, and let go friends that wouldn't. I took the PSU test to get into college. I got into where I wanted to (I was going for Computer Science at PUC)! Spoiler: my carreer didn't go exactly as planned. We'll get to that. I broke up with my highschool boyfriend (he is currently married with a baby), we got back together in

2016. I started college in San Joaquín (at the middle of the year he broke up with me and that was that). I actually started in the summer with some calculus and algebra introductory courses for kids who didn't learn these things in school. That's where I actually met my current friends. Crazy I've known them for so long. So this friend from school got in with me and she was more of an introvert than I was in school, but she got into college with a mission: she was going to be an extrovert. Oh and also like sort of slutty. Good for her. We got into these classes together and when we got there she had already made plans for lunch with some of the class in a Facebook group. I would never. And I'm forever grateful. We had lunch with them every day those 2 weeks. We had some after-class get-togethers as well. I was added to the class WhatsApp group that got bigger and bigger (because everyone needed friends). By the time class started in march the group was full (I think the limit back then was like 150 people?). Come march my friends didn't talk in that group and I lost touch with them. It was a lonely first semester.

I went to San Joaquín in a "turno" that year. Carpool. Facebook was still a thing back then and turns out 2 kids from my year lived in my building! What are the odds. We carpooled for the first 2 years of school I think. Oh, the summer before school my brother had nose surgery, my cousin Pedro came to visit (while I was at summer camp) and they picked out my first car. It was a white Chery, very tiny. It looked like a marshmallow. It had no bluetooth nor aux input so I made a pendrive with songs that always played in the same order. It was like having one very long song that played every day from where I left off the day before. Like an audio book.

I was terrible at school. I remember that year I felt so smart when I got in because I was so good at school, that I didn't study for my tests and failed 3/5 of my courses. Big punch in the gut to my ego. I also attribute it to not really having a group of friends. I made a girl friend group that was in my Desafíos (first year project/innovation type class) and they were cool but most were not my vibe. A lot of partying every day of the week. 

The second semester, since I failed everything mostly, 2 things happened:

1. I found a bunch of my summer friends had failed too and were in my repeat classes.
2. I didn't meet the requirements for normal 2nd semester courses, so I had to take an elective.

The elective was in the faculty of education, towards the front of the campus. This is only relevant, because the class was right before lunch time. Walking back to engineering after my first class that semester, I found my summer friends! Turns out they always sat in some tables that were on the outside of engineering and were on my way from this class. I literally saw them all sitting together and my first thought was "they hate me and made a new group without me". I walked by and they were like "why don't you have lunch with us anymore?". And I was like "I didn't know you had lunch here, I never heard from you again". That's when we all realized I had been left out of the new WhatsApp group they made because the other one was full of random people. Flash forward and by the end of that year I

• Had lunch with them every day and learned to play Carecaca, a card game.
• Met my best guy friend J and my best girl friend G. They had entered the group while I was not around.
• Went to the engineering gala and danced all night with A, who I had a crush on at the time but he finally just became a really good friend especially in the first years of college. Today we are still great friends but not as close as before.
• Went to A's house in the south of Chile that summer for 10 days and had some of the best experiences ever. I tell the stories that happened one night there as my "wildest" stories. Can't say I have a LOT of those, and that's OK I think.

Also, my grandpa on my mom's side was diagnosed with cancer this year (if I remember correctly). We went to visit in Brasil at the end of the year.

2017: My mom crashed her car. She was OK but got worried of what would happen if I crashed the marshmallow. I got a new car and I LOVED IT. It was a Hyundai Grand i10, dark greyish blue. He was perfect and was my bestie till last year. Failed some more courses. 

Also, this year I went back to singing. I was part of the battle of the bands the second semester and it was a disaster. It was like 20 people on stage and sooo chaotic. But it was fun to be a part of it.

2018: This year was the ombligo, a weekend-long party to celebrate the half of the carreer (spoiler, this was not the half of mine). It was fun and that weekend was another of my "wild side" moments. My friends could not believe. This is all I will say, no regrets. Very fun memories.

This year I was introduced to IDI: the major in design and innovation engineering. I ended up chosing it over computer science. It was the best decision I ever made. G also picked it and we got much closer as we did some classes together (not all of them, because she didn't fail any the first years). This was the last year I failed any classes, but I was scared of this the rest of my carreer so I mostly took 4 class semesters for the rest of my years at school. 

Also, this year I started with some computer science courses. I discarded the major but did the minor and loved it. I formed my carreer to be half design and half tech and that has been awesome. I remember I had a Windows computer and in my first software class someone said I had to have a Macbook if I wanted to program because in Windows you had to either patition to have Linux or install a virtual machine and this was so overwhelming to me that I had a panic attack and asked my parents if I could have a Macbook. I have never gone back to Windows and am very thankful (though I feel I should've handled that better).

This year me and J took over the battle of the bands. He was (and still is) a bit snobby when it comes to music, and he decided (dictated) that we were doing exclusively The Lion King songs for the 10 minutes we had on stage. He ended up convincing me and the rest. IT WAS A FREAKING MASTERPIECE. We had a sax and base and a great drummer and we killed it. We practiced so much and we even had theatrical interventions, costumes... this was amazing. I feel like J had post-partum depression after birthing this musical. Literally. We got second place (unfairly) but we felt like the kings. 

I have been going on for a while, so I'll make a part 2, for those still engaged in my story (I am).

Love, Debbie.