自動書記 / Free Writing

Oh, yeah. It's been a week already -- which is a bad sign that the time goes faster than I can perceive. Not too many updates indeed. Life is life, I guess... Well, then again, what is the meaning of life if you just pass it without finding anything new? So, that's a bad sign if you don't perceive the flow of time. When you close your eyes and open them again, you find that a week has passed. That's what happened to me in the past 8 days. Sorry guys for my absence from iKnow.

Now, this is what J-Girl called "free writing". Number 1, prepare a pen and paper. Well, a laptop computer replaces a pen and paper these days. Number 2, set up the theme. Oh man, I need to call it free^2 writing (free free writing), since I don't have a theme here. This is simply a flow of my mind. Number 3, set up a timer, how long you keep writing. Oh man, I should call it free^3 writing... If I want to stop, I will stop. Any comments on that? No? Good. Number 4, just keep writing. Don't make an outline. Don't worry the logical flow or mistakes in grammar or typos. I like that part. Number 5, just keep writing, you idiot! No, J-Girl didn't say 'you idiot'. She is a nice girl. Number 6, once you are done, count the number of words you wrote. There we go. Somebody, can you count the number of words up to here, please?

OK, that's not fun. Let's talk about some episode. My coworker came to NY on Tuesday. It's been almost a year and half since I saw him last time. Now, here is the story. He is originally from India and so is his wife. So, he has a work visa (H1-B) in the US which needed to be extended back then. As many people do for visa extension, he needed to go outside the US and apply for the extension. He chose Vancouber because he was based in California. So, he went to the US consulate office in Vancouver and applied for the visa extension for him and his wife. Now, something bad happened. CIA had found another Indian guy of the same name with my coworker -- in the black list for potential terrorist groups. Well, I guess those people are too good or too stupid to confuse such innocent hard-working Indian guy with some stupid dude. Anyway, he and his wife were stuck in Vancouver -- for a year. Unbelievable, man. A year can't pass simply by closing and opening your eyes. I believe our company did a decent job to support his status, but it was the day that he was finally granted with the US working visa, on the exactly same day he received a letter from Canadian government which said he had to leave the country ASAP. After that, I could tell how nervous he was when he landed and went through immigration at Oakland airport (or SFO, I don't recall). I hope he didn't look too weird from his nervousness.

Now, he is a happy Californian. The first thing he did was to take a month long vacation to go back to India and visit his family and his wife's. A good thing about California is that you can roll over your vacation days from a year to the next year. So, he accumulated a month worth of vacation days. Well, he should be rewarded anyway considering what he had to go through. Of course, ladies and gentlemen, visiting his family is just an official reason. The real purpose is to find out the bad one and .... Hopefully he succeeded, oops, failed. Sorry, I'm Catholic, I should be nice, too.

That's the whole story for now. He is still here in NY. We are going to have a group dinner on Friday to a kosher steakhouse. Why kosher? We have a orthodox Jewish woman in our group. So, every time we go for a group lunch, it must be something kosher. We like that. Especially I like that steakhouse we are going. They have good pickles.

Happy ending, huh?

Cheers,