Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.

Mexico City is the center of art and culture and politics and has been and continues to be for Latin America in a way that I think really called to me as an artistic person, as someone that was interested in the politics of Latin America, you know. God, every single famous person in Latin American history and art and politics seems to have found their way to Mexico City.

We're accepted as long as we conform to what we are expected to be, and I'm sure that's not any different for anyone else.

When people are always telling you that you have to have a lot of women, women are very important, there's a chance that you might actually begin to observe them on a more fundamental level. Then you get so much focus that one day you might actually see. Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.

As for my slowness as a writer - that's been a struggle, no question. We live in a culture that values and rewards machine-speed productivity. Even the arts are expected to conform to the Taylor model of productivity.

I love the kookiness of our speech. Speech is like wonderful magic and poetry in itself. I've always had to crib a lot from what I've heard.

To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs.