Friday, May 17

 Woke up around 7. The train was not busy: I read Maslowska on the train. It's getting quite funny. Alisa is the good girl who won't let them smoke and drink. What does she want though? The other girls just want drugs from Andjei, but what does Alisa want?

Она тогда говорит: Алиса, и подает мне руку с золотым колечком, которое я сразу замечаю. Она учится в экономическом институте, говорит Каспер и кладет ей руку на задницу с таким видом, что я даже удивляюсь, как это он не спустил от удовольствия. Она мягко, но решительно снимает его руку и говорит: но параллельно я заканчиваю курсы секретаря со знанием немецкого. После таких курсов меня возьмут на работу везде, в любую контору, в любой секретариат, везде. ...

Выглядит она примерно так: первым делом глухая водолазка с намертво закрытым горлом. Волосы серые, мышиные, заколотые на макушке заколкой с надписью «Закопане 1999». На шее золотая цепочка с крестиком поверх водолазки, на что я еще перед этим обратил внимание. Дальше она выглядит так: штаны от брючного или летнего костюма, книзу суженные, плюс ортопедические сандалеты. Девица из разряда: домашняя курица. Уберет, обед приготовит, вернет в лоно католицизма.

At work, I was trying to make the client UI. Simple things: a button, an input box, some sliding-down animation. I'm debating on asking Ryan to help me with the UI, but then, say, it'd be good to understand the client a little bit with this fairly simple UI work. So, I almost finished the client by noon, except for the animation. The animation didn't work: I started monkey-coding various attempts before I decided to stop and do something else.

There was an end-of-spring demo meeting after lunch. One demo, second demo, then calling for more demos – everyone silent. I thought I'd show my buttons and text boxes. The other ten people didn't show anything. Seems like people don't really like this demo meeting and rebel against it. I'm still clueless; and I don't want to care about office politics.

In the afternoon I went for coffee, and then sat outside the building in the garden; it was cloudy but warm. The cafe was crap, called Grumpy Cafe; but their $5 coffee is a way-way better than the coffee from the deli for $2.50. Dang! I figured out the emailing lambda. Turned out AWS SAM worked fine, just shows the OOM message on every request. But things are done; updated. Hell with this OOM message – it's just for testing.

Randomly, I learned about Ezra Meeker who traveled the Oregon Trail on an ox-drawn wagon while young, and then wrote extensively about that trip all his life. Makes me feel better about my China diary that I couldn't finish for almost a year already. 

In the evening we grabbed a pizza and watched the movie recommended by Gandhi called "Shortcomings", a light comedy that turned out deeper than it seemed at first, about the Asian-American identity crisis and inter-racial relationships. The scriptwriter is the protagonist, basically, as I understood – he's the 4th generation Japanese-American; his parents grew up in Japanese detention camps during WW2. I think the story makes more sense placed in the 2000s. America changed since then. Maybe I'm wrong about it. It's also interesting how gay identity is normalized in the movie mirroring the straight identity, but the race race is a source of problems. Except for the parents.

Slept late by 1am.