As a few of you know, I lived four years in a students' hall in León while I was doing my first degree. Most of the experience, as a few of you know, I loathed: I didn't like to share so much room for so much time with people who(m) I don't give a damn for. I put on about seven kilos during my first year due to the fatty food... OK, due PARTLY to the fatty food. I was at the end of my tether by the middle of the fourth year, wishing a slow and painful death not to one, but several boys in my corridor. Overall, you can tell I didn't exactly enjoy the experience.
Despite the BITTERsweet memories (ah, the memories), I will always be grateful for the few friends I made there. Of approximately 250-300 people (it's far from accurate... If someone wants to do the maths, please do), I talked more than five times with about 30, and almost eight years later, I'm still friends with... Three. An engineer and two scientists (biologists), for which I am also grateful because, how would I have met scientists and/or technical experts if not showing my lack of social abilities in front of other 120 human beings in a dinner hall and a TV room? They were great, and they still are, and no matter how life (mis)treat us, it is comforting to know they are there (and I hope they know I am here).
Tearful confessions made, it was thanks to the biologists that I finally understood the evolution theory. Haha, you will think, that's so easy it is embarrasing you didn't understand it! Fine. Laugh if you must. I used to believe that evolutionary movements in the history of species were governed by a general impulse towards improvement. "No, no, no, NO", my exquisitely patient friends would say. "No impulse towards anything. Just change, and random". "But if not for the best, how and why do animals evolve?". "What you just said, that's intelligent design speaking; you think that there must be a force behind evolution, somehow guiding it towards the best... Maybe God. But animals don't change for the best, or governed by a superior being or force. They (we) just do." I understood what they were trying to tell me - I mean, I understood how they used verbs and clauses, and their connotations (I am a linguist, after all), but I didn't grasp the implications of the theory.
 Oh well. One sunny afternoon I was in my parents' orchard, just hanging around. I was feeling guilty because everybody was working but me, so my father gave me a plastic bag and a pair of gloves. "You can pick up the beetles on the potato leaves". The beetles are black and white, and easy to spot, so easy in fact that the task soon became boring and my mind, as usual, drifted away. "You poor little buggers, being black and white over a sea of green. Picking you up must be a piece of pie for your natural predators, as it is for me now. It's unlucky, if only you were green...Wait. Crazy diving into the gene pool, suppose one of you were born green. Your chances to survive would grow exponentially and you would be able to impregnate a lot of females (yuck, yuck, pregnant beetles...). Most of your descendants would be black and white, but at least some of them would be green like you... And that would give them advantage over their black and white brothers and sisters". With a slightly embarrased smile on my face, I realized. Finally.
 (Guys, feel free to correct me if needed. As always).