Diseño de identidad

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(Más de este proyecto aquí) 

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Freelance
Nahema Vivó 

Diseño de identidad para departamento de finanzas de Wrigley México

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(Más de este proyecto aquí) 

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Dirección de Arte:
Pablo Leva, Julián Rosales
Naming y Conceptualización: 
Diana Fernández, José Rodríguez
Diseño:
Nahema Vivó 

Hecho por La Sociedad Comunicación y Publicidad
Monterrey, N.L., México
lasociedad.com.mx

Diseño de stand, pósters y POP para Wrigley México en Confitexpo 2011

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(Más de este proyecto aquí) 

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Dirección de Arte:
Pablo Leva, Julián Rosales
Arte de Personajes: 
Rafael Ayala
Diseño:
Nahema Vivó 

Hecho por La Sociedad Comunicación y Publicidad
Monterrey, N.L., México
lasociedad.com.mx

Diseño de logotipo, empaque y POP para nueva línea de Skwinkles® Salsagheti®

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(Más de este proyecto aquí) 

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Dirección de Arte:
Pablo Leva, Julián Rosales
Diseño:
Nahema Vivó 

Hecho por La Sociedad Comunicación y Publicidad
Monterrey, N.L., México
lasociedad.com.mx

Identidad y diseño de página web

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(Más de este proyecto aquí) 

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Freelance
Nahema Vivó 

Diseño de logotipo, empaque y POP para nueva presentación de Skwinkles®

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(Más de este proyecto aquí) 

~ 

Dirección de Arte:
Pablo Leva, Julián Rosales
Arte de Personajes: 
Rafael Ayala
Diseño:
Nahema Vivó 

Hecho por La Sociedad Comunicación y Publicidad
Monterrey, N.L., México
lasociedad.com.mx

March 21rst. marked the 2nd month anniversary of me not writing a single word in twitter.

Prior to January 21rst., my relationship with twitter had been that of a person who was totally obsessed with the microblogging site but was totally unaware of the things posted there, at the same time.

But that all changed that day, the moment I downloaded my entire twitter history and re-read it.

Before that moment, I thought I had been using it as a comedic “public journal”…
After reading it, I realized I was in fact using it as my personal (but very public) micro-diary, and that most of my “jokes” didn’t come out as funny at all. Instead, I sounded like a bitter bitch (to put it mildly).

And I bitched a lot…

There was a month, about a year or so back, that I tweeted over one thousand times and most of those were to bitch about something.
I did the math and realized I went in there and bitched over 30 times a day.
Who does that?!

Me. 
I did it.

Then I remembered reading an article somewhere that talked about how social-networking sites are an outlet for ordinary people to express thoughts that would otherwise be kept to themselves for fear that no one will care in real life.
It said something along the lines of the less relevant a person feels, the more they use social networking sites as a way of saying “Hey, I’m here!, I exit! This is what is on my mind and you should care about it because I’m original and witty and whatever!”.

I used twitter because of that, but for many years I glossed over this feeling with a “I’m not writing for them, I’m writing for me” mantra that was utter bullcrap.
I was writing for them.
I was writing for them to realize what a funny, witty person I am.

The kind of sad thing was, after a couple of days of not writing anything in twitter, I thought my followers would realize I had gone MIA and demand my return…
Only one person did, and that person happend to be one of my best friends (who happened to love the hater-nonsense I posted there, again and again).

So that was it, you know.

What was the point in writing personal things there?
I’m not a public person.
Who cares if I hate traffic on fridays, or that this city smells like shit sometimes, or that guys here are misogynists twats or that I hate the word “melomaniac”?
No one, that’s who.
And I didn’t need any more of that crap plastered all over my internet history, where everything stays there, forever.

So, I’m posting this here because I wanted to commemorate the fact that I am now Twitting-obsession free.

And it might seem a little ironic that I’m posting about this in a blog, but, you know

About a month or so ago, my dad’s boss’ father asked him if he wanted to adopt a Golden Retriever he couldn’t take care of anymore. 

Seeing how the 2 dogs that were left in my parents’ house are super old (like 15, which is a lot in dog years), they said yes.

The Golden Retriever was pregnant.
Upon arriving to the house, the Golden Retriever proceded to go into labor and birth 6 puppies.

This is what they looked like a day old:

These are them about a week ago:

There hadn’t been that many puppies in the house in a long time.

The point of this post is just to say that I love them, even though I haven’t met them and I want to go home really bad, just to sit down with them and have this happen to me:

But they’ll probably get them new homes by the time I get there.

I got scolded at work today because I messed up and I was late for a meeting and didn’t let my boss know in time I was going to be late.

Anyway, I have to get home and start writing my December story.

Yes.

Sometimes I feel I’m living in a The Hills episode and I’m Ugly Betty.

Today was not a good day.

Sometimes the world just has a way of getting to you.

I was thinking of what to write but it is too much pressure and I’m blocked so I’ll just feel frustrated with myself right now.

When I was 17 I got in to a really bad car accident and broke my hip in several places. I was bedbound for 8 weeks aprox (6 in the hospital, the rest of them at my house).

For those 8+ weeks, I had to do my business in one of these things.

The nurses, my mother, father, sister, a cousin that was studying medicine and - sometimes - my brother had to help me “use” it and then help me wipe myself.

I am grateful to each and every one that helped me do these things when I couldn’t do them by myself but it was awful. 

It was AWFUL AS SHIT… 
Literally.

Specially in those days of the month, you know.

Ugh, I get goose bumps just remembering that whole episode.

Anyway, when those 8 weeks passed I was able to stand up in one leg (the left one, because I still couldn’t put pressure on the right side of the hip) and sit down. An aunt got me a second hand wheel chair so I could move around the house. The first thing I did in that wheelchair was check if I was able to fit in the bathroom with it.

I was.

Inside the bathroom, I stood up from the chair and started jumping on my left leg. I didn’t have that much strength (given that it had had almost 0 use of my leg muscles in 2+ months) so it took a few minutes and a lot of effort to be able to sit down on the toilet.

My mom was there trying to help me out, but once I sat down by myself, I asked her to take the chair out and close the door.

“Are you sure, mija?” - she asked me

“Please” - I replied.

When that door closed…

Man, when that door closed I felt FREE. I had never felt so free in my 17 years of existence.

I couldn’t believe I was finally sitting down in a toilet. BY MYSELF.

It was one of the most liberating feelings I’ve had in my life.

It was only then that I realized I didn’t really need to go, but it didn’t matter. I knew I would have to, eventually, so I just sat there, grinning like an idiot until I felt the need to go number 2.

When I did, I cried. I knew my mom was still outside the door waiting for me, so I cried silently, but I cried a lot…

Since then I’ve never taken the ability to pee, poop or just be alone in the bathroom for granted.

This is how taking a crap or a long piss made it to my “Top 3 Simple Pleasures in Life” list and I will never shut up about poop, piss and farts.

There was a time, in elementary school, when I firmly believed I could be I was an Olympic Gymnast.

I believed this wholeheartedly because, out of all my classmates, cousins and siblings, I was the only one who could do handstands (but only if I was leaning my feet on walls) and cartwheels.

Now, I know being a gymnast requires a lot more than just the ability to do these two things, but in my head, the facts were these:

There was a point where I believed this so much, my parents sent me to a Gymnastics Summer program for kids the State University held each year. My aunt Norma was a teacher there so she helped us with the enrollment.
Once I was in, she picked me up every morning, at 7 a.m. and took me to my class.

I kinda blocked out a lot of what happened there because most of the time I felt like an awkward giant, since I was much taller than the kids my age* and as tall as some of the older kids that had had some years of training.

What I do remember from that summer is that my “Olympic Gymnast” bubble burst once I saw girls doing back and front flips and twirls in the uneven bars and flying and soaring thru the air like it was the most normal thing ever… and because of a a girl named Denisse.

Denisse was a short, super skinny girl that was in the same group as me, who also thought she was the best gymnast in the world because she could bend back in to a bridge, then do a handstand, then bend forwards to stand up without gaining momentum. There must be a name for this particular movement, but since I don’t know it, I drew it. It went kinda like this:

Needless to say, I hated Denisse
…and her mom which was one of those overbearing, loud moms that are loud and overbearing.

After a couple of weeks in the program, I stopped wanting to go. This was, in part, because of the whole “feeling like a giant” thing but it was also because waking up that early, every day, for weeks on end on my childhood summer vacations was taking a toll on me.  

My mom told me I had to keep going until the month was over (I guess she’d already paid the full month’s fee) but if I still felt like quitting the pursuit of becoming México’s next Nadia Comaneci after that, it would be O.K. 

… So I kept going.
On one particular day — when I was feeling sleepy and not very good about being there — little miss Denisse came up to me.

“Can you do this?” - she asked me, flipping back and forth in her ugly, little, red leotard.
“You know I can’t” - I answered, rolling my eyes at her. We’d been in the same group for two weeks and she very well knew I couldn’t do flips like she could.
“Mmmh… my mom says it’s ‘cause you’re too tall and kind of overweight” - she said.

That was the last straw. 
I wanted to punch Denisse in the face and then go to the bleachers and punch her loud mom, but I knew better than to hit people that were shorter than me, so I just pushed her out of my way as hard as I could  and ran to the bathroom.

The girl’s bathroom was filled with older gymnasts and, since I didn’t want anyone to look at me or to see anyone in a leotard, I locked myself in a bathroom stall and waited until my aunt came looking for me.

It amazes me, now, how a rude little comment from a rude little girl could get me from feeling like Nadia Comaneci to this:

in just a few seconds, but it did and that was the end of “Nahemaneci” (which was the nickname no one gave me ever)

After that, I still pretended to be a rogue gymnast sometimes and I learned how to do one-hand and no-hand cartwheels on my own, but I could only do them if I gained a LOT of momentum by running for yards and yards, or else I would fall head first.

Another thing I learned how to do, was back flips in the monkey bars, like these:

I did this all thru out junior high, but once I graduated from junior high and left the school, I stopped doing this, only to try it one more time, about a decade later.

—-

About a decade later:

When I was twenty three, I went to my parents house in Mexicali for Christmas.

While I was there, I started going to the park to jog ‘cause I didn’t want to gain a lot of weight with all the Christmas food that is around everyone’s house at these times.

The park where I jogged had a complete jungle gym set and by “complete” I mean “it had monkey bars.”

One day, when I was feeling particularly athletic, a great idea dawned upon me:

“What if I try to do a back flip, for old times’ sake? I’m still pretty athletic” — I thought to myself (I had only started jogging a week before this) — “and I’m still young. Twenty three is not that old. I’m in my prime!”

And this was pretty much all the convincing I needed for one of the worst ideas in the world.

I climbed up those monkey bars, sat down on the edge and just went for it.

After a few minutes of being upside down, I went from feeling like this:
 

To this:
 

I decided it was time to do the back flip.

I tried as hard as I could to lift  the upper part of my body up so I could grab the bar to flip.  I wasn’t counting on me not having any upper body strength anymore, so doing this took all the energy I had.

By the time I was in mid flip, I was exhausted and couldn’t turn all the way…

…and I was stuck.

I tried to analyze my options before entering full panic mode only to realize I’d entered full panic mode the second I realized I was having a hard time lifting my upper body.
Analyzing my options made my panic attack even worse, because they were to:

• either, let go of the bar and try to fall on my side so I wouldn’t fall flat on my back, with the risk of breaking my neck OR
• try with all of my might to get my legs back on the bar and see where to go from there.

So I tried with all of my might to get my legs back on the bar and see where to go from there, but I couldn’t.

After a few of the longest minutes of my life (and just as I was about to let go) I heard some noises in the background. People’s noises.

I remembered having seen some guys playing soccer in the middle of the park when I was jogging. 

I turned my head and saw the goalie for one of the teams just standing there.

“Hey, hey you!” - I yelled.

The guy turned, saw me, let out a few loud laughs and ran towards me.

“You need some help?” - he asked once he got to where I was, trying his hardest not to laugh.

Saying I felt embarrassed is an understatement to the level of shame I felt — this level of shame kept me from drawing an image resembling this episode in my life, so just imagine it. —

He helped me get down and once I had my two feet on the ground I thanked him, trying my hardest not to make eye contact.

“Don’t worry, I don’t think anyone else saw you” - was his answer.

He shook my hand in a “well played” sort of way (you know, the way someone from the other team shakes your hand when you lose a game) and left to cover his post.

I ran as fast as I could towards my house, without looking back.

And that was the end of it my career as an Olympic Gymnast.

*The times where I’ve felt taller than everyone else in a room or class will come up repeatedly, for I’ve felt like this a lot of times in my life.

—-

Source of the animated gif: this video
Source of the pictures used: sxc.hu
All illustrations by me for Mindoodles® 2011

If you’re not from México -or were born after 1990 - I don’t think you ever saw a Kotex tv ad where a school girl asks another if “that thing ” happened to her yet or not.

You can watch the tv ad in this link, but it was dubbed and says other things that, frankly, aren’t as funny as the original commercial, which I can’t find.
Translating it, it went something like this:

Of course when the ad came out, just like Girl 2, I had no idea what crazy little Girl 1 was talking about, but - having a Mom and an older sister - I knew Kotex was a brand for a product only they used and had caused my sister to be overly irracional.
I also knew it was a product no one ever talked about.

Since I grew up in a border town we used to get NBC, CBS and ABC (which later changed to Fox) channels in our local tv. This was the best thing that could’ve ever happen to me - tvchannelwise - and will come up in future post, I predict.

American channels had a different dynamic for feminine product ads (which mexican commercials adopted later): they started calling those pads “feminine towels”  and they all featured blue liquid poured over the pad in some way, to show their “superior technology” just like this:

 To be honest, I don’t know if they’d always called them “feminine towels”  or if I just noticed that after turning ten, but this way of showing women’s pads’ absorption power stuck like glue and campaign creatives or whatever ran with it and used it for many many years (I imagine them all running glued together, for some reason).

Since I knew that that product brought shame and emotional imbalance to all women who used them (I had the living proof of that in my sister and mother, who sometimes joined her), I knew better than to ever even mention them. 

And so, my quest began to find out what those things were and did.

Since we didn’t have an encyclopedia (I need not tell you, this was long before cd roms and the internet) and the school’s library access was reserved for junior high students, I looked up the word in the dictionary, only to find out there was no “feminine towel” entry anywhere to be found in it (that’s just how EVIL they were!).

Having nowhere else to turn to, it was up to me, my super intelligence and logic to figure out the secret behind those evil little things.
I don’t remember how long it took for me to figure the whole ordeal out. I remember it being a day but it could’ve been a whole weekend just as easily.
What I do remember is the feeling of superiorness I felt when I finally cracked the “feminine towel”  secret code and was finally in on their little secret.

I didn’t tell anyone about this until much later.

—

Much later:

Every Super Bowl Sunday, my mom and dad would gather with their old University friends and their kids in one of our houses to watch the game and eat some barbecued stuff.
Every year it was a different house.
The house owner had to have the proper barbecue grill, seating accommodations for twenty to thirty people (including kids) and - most importantly - a big ass tv screen where to watch the game and halftime show/ads. That year my dad had bought a big ass tv so it was finally our turn to host the Super Bowl Sunday barbecue.

Most of the couples had kids my and my sibling’s age.
One of the couples was my mom’s sister and her husband, so four of my closest cousins were always around to play around with if the other kids bored me us.
The eldest (I’ll call her Loana ‘cause that’s her name) was super funny and always made me laugh so I always tried to be around her when I saw her. Loana was my older sister’s age, but didn’t seem to be affected by the “Ugh!leavemealoneyou’rebotheringme” virus that had struck and sickened my sister. This only made her ten thousand times cooler in my book.

Anything Loana did I tried to do.
That day she decided the only thing she was going to do was lay down in front of the tv and watch the game so I did the same.
That was turning out to be a very boring thing to do…

until a “feminine towel” ad came on.

“This is my time to shine” - I must’ve thought.

Trying to impress my cousin, all the other kids, their parents, my parents and -most importantly- my big sister, I kneeled down and, making sure my mom was there and could hear me, I asked her in a very “matter-of-factly” tone:

“Those are the ones you and my sister stick to your bathroom towels to dry off whenever you’re feeling angry, right?” 

There was a lot of silence… and then everyone started laughing.
Everyone except for my mom, of course. She just turned red.

Now, before you start laughing or rolling your eyes, let me explain to you the logic that lead me to that conclusion:

1. The blue liquid was water, obviously.
2. “Feminine towels” were called that because of two things:
   a. They were little towels for women.
   b. TV ad creative people weren’t really creative when it came to name girl stuff because most of them were men and all men just thought girl stuff was yucky and so they named these things the first thing they could think of, which, of course, was something super obvious like “feminine towels”.
3. They were little because everything little is cute and everything cute is feminine.
4. They had velcro or sticky glue so you could stick a bunch of them on your regular towel and then throw them away.
5. Since one of those little towels couldn’t possibly dry off an entire woman body, many of them were needed.
6. There were no “masculine towels” because men were tough and could handle regular towels.
7. They were used the one time a month when women wanted to stop being mad about absolutely everything, for no reason at all.
8. This was evil because it was not natural. It was “technology” trying to mess up with what nature intended woman to be like, but since my sister and mother used them, they couldn’t be that bad so, logically they were just as evil as Halloween (another word I could never find in the dictionary at that time*): not really that bad. 

As you can see, my logic was flawless… or so I thought.
As soon as I finished saying that sentence, I knew I had said something utterly stupid. 

I felt really embarrassed so I did the only thing I could’ve done: I got up and locked myself in my room. My two other cousins (Loana’s sisters Tanya and Bibiana, who are my age) tried to console me and to get me to go out and play but I wouldn’t have any of that. I wanted to bask in my embarrassment until everyone left, so I did.

The incident was not mentioned by anyone in my house for a whole week. Not even by my brother who used to tease me and make fun of me whenever I said something stupid (which was very often). This only made me realize I had said something really, REALLY stupid and it was very frustrating not to know exactly what it was.
I felt out on the joke again and farther away from knowing the secret than ever before.

The next weekend my mom called me up to her room.

“Now I’m REALLY going to get it” - I thought to myself as I walked, slowly and crestfallen, to her room.
When I got there I saw her sitting on her side of the bed with a book. She told me to close the door and go sit next to her.
Thinking something along the lines of “Aw, man!” I closed the door and crossed my fingers. When I sat next to her, I adopted a perpetual state of flinchness (a word I just made up) so to not be as startled when she started yelling at me as I could be if I were not flinching perpetually.

To my surprise, not only did she not scream or scold me, but she used her motherly tone when she told me to get closer and opened her book.

“You’re not going to learn this in school until next year but I’m going to tell you now so you know about it before any of your classmates” - she said.

“You really embarrassed me because I don’t know where you got the stupid idea you blurted out infront of all my friends and your cousins and siblings, so now I have to tell you about this” - was the only thing I heard.

The book was about gestation and pregnancy. 
She read it to me out loud. It had been years since she read anything out loud to me (except for things she had written down in her amazing cursive penmanship I couldn’t read well until I was in highschool), but I couldn’t really pay attention to what she was reading for the first few pages because of the embarrassment I still felt.

I understood everything there was to know about the 9 month gestation period women have to go thru in order to bring a baby in to this world, but by the end of the book, I still didn’t get what any of that had to do with “feminine towels” or where the fit in that equation.

She asked me if I had any questions, and since I knew it was then or never, I mustered the courage to ask her about them directly.

And that’s how I learned what “Feminine towels” were and did.

Obviously, after knowing their true purpose in life, I felt eighty thousand times more embarrassed of what I’d said infront of all of her friends and my cousins and my siblings, but it all went away the next year, when we learned about all of that stuff in school and I found out most of my female classmates didn’t know what“feminine towels” were or did and I did, just like my mom had told me.

* I later figured out (all on my own) I couldn’t find the word “Halloween” in a dictionary because this word is in english and my dictionary was in spanish.

Roy Lichtenstein’s “Screaming Lady” or 
“DUDE, WHERE’S MY CAR?!: Me to myself, everytime I get out from a shopping malll”

Nude beach sign for a person like me.

I just had a dream where I was eating a sort of thin, cookie man shaped Butterfinger and a watermelon and chili flavored lollipop at the same time.

All the while, I was arguing with my chauffeur because he wanted to take my Gansito* as payment for the Gansito* I’d taken from him (and eaten) prior to eating the anorexic Butterfingered Cookie man and lollipop.

Since I’d already given him a piece of carrot cake, I was trying to convince him on the unfairness of him taking anything else from me.

“You see” - he said - “you’re not only repaying me for eating my Gansito*. You also have to repay having taken it when I most wanted it”.
Thus, the chauffeur in my dream introduced me to the -real life applicable - concept of interest charges for the hassle of not being able to fulfill one’s food cravings when one most wants to.

I understood it all and gave him my Gansito*
—

* A Gansito is a Twinkie-like, chocolate covered, strawberry filled pastry you can buy in México. 

Other sidenotes: Yes, I dream about food a lot so whatever and no, I don’t have a chauffeur.