Last week I had a serious trouble with my tooth. Its not really a tooth, but rather a gum. Its annoying and annoying and annoying, but a good side of it is that you can live with it: it doesn't hurt that much. Well, I wanted to fix it at some point, but whoever I talked to told me not to go to american dentists if you either: (1) have no insurance(which I don't have) or (2) look like someone who has a serious trouble (which I have). So I skipped dentist last weekend and now it is getting better. Hopefully I will survive until I leave country, otherwise I am prepered to waste a grand on fucking dental mafia(some of you probably know what I think about dental/health mafia, and for others I have to say that there is no positive words to describe those sophisticated clans building their social and financial empire on the misery of ill people).
Putting down my weaknesses (or stupidity) here on blog, help me to observe it and make some actions to recover from it. Well, I booked the ticket for nyc and got a beautiful weekend there. It started with great flight with jetblue.If you ever have a chance to travel with JetBlue airlines, give it a shot. This is especially important for those of you taller than 190, as it gives more space than any airline I have ever used before. Great tv program, great multivitamin beverages, and cabin crew is natural: too friendly but not unfriendly at all. Overall great experience.
When I arrived in nyc, I took the subway to Manhattan (5$+2$). Dejan was already up by the time I arrived ad his place in mid-lower east side. He went to see his boss at nyc and I slept whole day. First thing I saw when I woke up was 19-year-old, underwear-model flatmate. Very interesting character but keeping him as a flatmate is dangerous: imagine your girlfriend sharing a house with some random super-hot-model-wannabe girl. Its tricky.
The nightlife in nyc is a frustration rather than anything else. This particularly holds for guys like us: late twenties, accompanied with no girls. After living in ireland for so long, I couldnt get used to being rejected at so many places, just because we were guys only. I cant see conceptual difference between this and segregation in the fifties when afroamericans couldnt get onto buses or pubs. I can see buisness logic behind it, but its frustrating and I cannot see why those rich male new yorkers tolerate those ignorant bouncers. But it seems that americans are used to that kind of money-squeezing from their pockets, so they are not too willing to complain.
We (me, slovenac, vlada and ivko) somehow found a place, got drunk, got double pizza, and after all went home. At that point, probably because of my addiction, I took laptop just to perform my routine of meaningless uploading half a dozen webpages. Thats when I saw a single unread email: "Congratulations, your paper has been accepted at ACM SIGMETRICS 2008 as a full paper!". Fuck, at the same moment my drunk-happiness has been replaced with euphoria, screaming, kissing dejan, and promising things I didn't fulfill later. It was a relief. That was the first paper I wrote in more than a year and being accepted at such a big conference is an achievement... for outsiders like me.
Tomorrow we woke up at midday, and dejan was trying to convince me that I had a hangover, but I dont think that was the case, you can decide for youself:
Later that day, we went to a 25-minute gig of The Teenagers. This is a shot of some hipsters in waiting for the event;-)
Dzhuna arrived from Boston, early in the evening, and Vlada cooked for us some serbian sausages and we were ready for another miserable set of fights with bouncers. Nothing special happened, the routine from previous night was followed, but this time without any paper-acceptance notifications.
Getting to the airport tomorrow morning was tight: someone pulled an emergency in the subway and it wasnt moving for some 25 minutes and I almost missed my flight. But, luckily it was late for 15 minutes and I got there on time. Flight features superbowl, and my least favorite NFL team (NE Patriots) came into the finals as huge favorites playing to outsiders: NY Giants. In the fourth quarter, most of the people in the plane were screaming and cheering for thier team: Giants won by scoring a touchdown 35 secs before end. Lovely game.
When I arrived in san jose, it was raining. My room was cold. My tooth-gum got better. My country elected a new president. My acceptance letter was still in inbox and I soberly read it one more time. After that I calmly went to the bad and for change had no problems sleeping.
4 comments:
So now my work is stuck, and since I am here for only 3 more weeks I cannot start doing anything significant at this point. Ok, you got the picture about how my job is going.
It is no first time, I hear from our people, new comer in US, similar evaluation about his working project. And, after some times, "nobody knows how" on the market appears revolutionary new product.
In the some time in our country every day people announced success in their projects supported by Ministry of science, for example, and on the end, project fail, because ...
Reading your sentence, you made, in one moment, association on the story of may friend he worked as a member of team developing new Jeep model in GM company. "The project is going dowdily, we don't have final request, the first test drive was muff, and so on ... Now I see, we worked better back there in Ei (Elecronska Industrija Nis)". He would say in some homesick moments.
This summer I was in Toronto and my good friend showed me his new Jeep, more specifically new implemented features that he worked on. I had to ask him: The project was successful evidently. What happened? I don't know - he sad. It seems, here things go on on many parallel domains. There is something (not easy viewable) pushing ahead in small constant steps, and results are coming on the fly.
Last week I was in Belgrade on Selling E.D.G.E. Cisco Unified Communication, Wireless, Services, Security Solution course. Since I track development in networking and specially CISCO technology over 10 years, I must say that I was very surprised when I saw that about 1/3 of technical details are new ideas for me.
so,
Who knows why you should be happy because your project is going on like that... :-)
I wanted to point out all your spelling and grammar errors, just because I am an old grumpy man, but then I read:
"When I arrived in san jose, it was raining. My room was cold. My tooth-gum got better. My country elected a new president. My acceptance letter was still in inbox and I soberly read it one more time. After that I calmly went to the bad and for change had no problems sleeping."
Simply poetic.
Rrrade! You saw the Teenagers? How come?!!
Lubi, your last sentence reminded me of the internal joke me and dejan used all the time during last weekend: "... which is not necessarily a bad thing" ("ko zna zashto je to dobro"). Then when I was leaving, we heard that Tadic won the elections and then dejan commented: "... which is not necessarily a good thing" ;-)
How come everyone knows for The Teenagers? Are they famous or what?
I am late to work agian...
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