Two promises to keep and one to let go

It’s past eight pm and somehow I’m stuck at the office again. I’m stuck at the office because I was teaching this course the whole afternoon and the boss called a meeting afterwards in which everyone had their notebooks ready and were writing stuff on them, mostly annotations, but probably not. Myself, I just doodled.
I drew comic book characters, “Eclipso” battling “Black Adam”, until the subject got a little too boring and I switched to nude women doing heinous acts better not described here instead.
People say that the likes of me are pretty good at brainstorming. I don’t know about that. There were a lot of jagged-edge lightning bolts on that notebook, though.

I imagined the bolts to be golden for no special reason whatsoever. But I like to talk and voice my opinions anyhow.

I like to place my opinions for everyone like it’s not really an option to choose otherwise because I’ve thought long and hard about well, everything and the kitchen sink well before a meeting starts so I don’t wanna listen to what other people have to say. They are wrong most of the time anyway.
Hey, Democracy kind of sucks. At least that’s my opinion on it, too.


Every time I’m being such a lunkhead with something, like, downright stubborn, my father tells me it’s because I’m very immature. Know that bit about the “mark of the immature man”?
Kind of like that, yeah.

I made a lot of promises back when I was a kid and for sheer immaturity I insist on keeping some of them to this day. I’m not entirely sure why, but I suspect it’s because of all those mid-1980s “coming of age” movies and cartoons about not letting go of your inner child when you grow up, stuff like that.
I was mostly impressed by things like that, back then.

Anyway.
It’s past eight pm and somehow I’m stuck at the office again and I’m thinking of three specific promises I made to myself when I was a kid and even though I had to give in and let go of one of them, the other two remain strong.
Cases in point:

I. Not taking Spanish lessons = (kept!)
When I was a kid I swore to myself I would never get Spanish classes because it sounds too dumb and because it’s so damn similar to Portuguese, I’d be losing my time. For some yet unknown reason, known only to Fortuna herself, it came to pass that I’ve come to work for this Chilean conglomerate, what do you know.
But have I survived so far or what!

II. Not taking MS-Excel lessons = (kept!)
Now what do you know: Not only I got to work for this Spanish-speaking company, I got to find myself in a position that relies very heavily on advanced use of MS-Excel and boy, I know zilch about those damn spreadsheets and formulas and whatnots.
I spent over an hour over a formula that had eight lines of text in it and I had to well, understand it before altering it whatever it was that I had to do. It took me the first ten minutes to spot a pattern in the formula and have a realization as how things worked (it was surprisingly similar to HTML, by the way, all those open/close tags and stuff). The rest of the time I spent tinkering and experimenting on the formula.
But have I survived so far or what, too.

III. Building a second, intermediate floor on a one-floor apartment = (nope)
As it turns out the operational feasibility for living in a one-floor apartment with a makeshift in-between second floor sandwiched between ground and ceiling is kind of nil, really.
I mean, it’d be like living in one of those Hobbit houses if you really think about it…