January 1, 2023

Unconstrained Poem

It’s no easy task to translate poems. Therefore, at the risk of not complying with both formal constraints (ryhmes, metric, etc.) and being faithful to the original content, I recommend you to check out the original version I wrote to my former colleagues of another lifetime.

December 26, 2021

Journey to the Past

Today, I worked at the office. After a morning spent in never-ending meetings, lunchtime came rightly as a savior. But there was some place I wanted to visit before eating lunch, so I left the office building. The distance to my destination was a 15-minute-long walk under the rain to the warping gate, followed by 10 seconds of warping time. My office was located at the capital of the United States of Europe, Bruxelles since President Christian Zhu unified disaggregated countries into one single superpower. After I arrived in front of the nearest warping gate, I told the machine my destination and it proceeded to check my identity by sending a query to the chip inside my head: “Take me to Mountainside Lake.” I paid 15 crypto-euros and then walked into the gate from which a neon-blue fluid emanated.

December 24, 2021

Decline

Laying on the sofa watching series

Watching series has become an ordinary activity shared by all social groups in the modern society. Poor and rich people alike all share the same hobbies. There is little difference in their cultural backgrounds. I imagine that, a few decades ago, wealthy members of society used to have different occupations from poorer ones. Beware, I don’t mean that I would want to go back to the past and have the poor illiterate and living in terrible conditions. What I mean by that is, for instance, the rich would read lots of books - got to the theatre, the opera, and open their minds. Whereas the destitute would hardly ever read, if they could read at all!

December 15, 2021

Tempest

I’ve always wondered what it felt to be that one guy: the popular one. The one guy who was always at the center of everything. The one guy who was surrounded by his crew, always laughing and governing as the highest caste the society. I’ve never been anything than more than a a discrete and transparent person ever since I’ve been a child. Now that I’m over 60 years old this year, I’ve come to question this envy I felt as a child and still felt during a large part of my life. But there is a probability that my line of thought adapted to my being a spectator rather than an actor, I might have needed to find excuses for being weak.

December 11, 2021

Talk

People don’t talk to each other, they merely speak at each other. I am not entirely sure if people have ever talked to each others, but I’ve recently noticed how difficult it was to have a meaningful conversation with anybody. Conversations all seem vacuous and express nothing but false pretenses. How can our society move forward at a time when all discussions turn to hysterical clashes where everybody tries to shoot the adversary down with shameless lies and ridiculous entitlements?

December 1, 2021

Authenticity

The world we live in is a world that has given up hope. The general mood has become constantly darker over time these past few years. Strong values such as friendship, family, and duty have all lost their meanings in today’s society where individuality has taken over mutual help and concern for the others. There is no such thing as home anymore. Families have been disintegrated as conflicts between newer and older generations break out, threatening the very foundations that our societies are based on.

October 17, 2021

Identity

Ever since I was born, I am the same person I’ve always been. Even before my birth, I was a character that has lived multiple lifetimes. I’ve lived numerous lives paved with daunting hardships. I knew true love and unconditional friendships. Although my overall look has never really changed from the green-eyed and brown-haired boy, I was alternately a small kid or a young man on a journey across time and space. I’ve worn many names and experienced so many various existences, however what remains constant is the trust I inspire in people. They trust me as a determined and dependent person who makes the utmost to protect his friends.

October 6, 2021

Simple

I recently witnessed an unreal case of over convoluting while tackling an issue. We had this project where the solution adopted was excessively complicated. In retrospect, this solution might have been chosen precisely because it was complicated, thus building a complex process made us feel smart even though it did not help to efficiently tackle the initial issue. Needless to say we were not as clever as we thought we were, many unpredicted edge cases appeared and we had to make efforts to fix these unexpected issues. Second was the on-boarding of new comers who frankly had a hard time getting used to the necessary complexity. As I reflect back on our approach and try to find out what could have been done to do it better, I realize that the main reason for our failure was this tendency to build complex and smart systems.

October 4, 2021

Beginning

I can’t count the number of times I was disappointed by the course of actions and endings of any books or movie. It seems that is it far easier to create a promise than to fulfill the glimpse of potential that was once given to the reader. Or is it that maybe the process of creating truly new and appealing artistic content is long and harsh, such that artists spend more time thinking about the premises and concept of a story but don’t when it comes to extend their work because they are tied by hard deadlines. I often realized that what happens after the main character took his resolution to part with his family and set out for a fantastic journey often ends up with a terrible series of clichés.

September 15, 2021

The Lighthouse

First day at the beach, I finally arrived after driving for ten hours from my hometown - a large city, to my destination for my holidays, a small town by the sea. I rented a house that had a fantastic view on the ocean. After unloading my luggage in the house - it was easy as there was only one person worth of luggage, I took a stroll around in search for a bakery to buy a sandwich. It didn’t take make me long to walk to the city center where the activities of town were gathered - a church, a butcher house, a hair stylist, a bank and - finally, a bakery.

Stories

These are selected stories that describe my most unsual experience.