Curiouser and Curiouser

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A FLUFFYZ
IM IN YR LOOP
      VISIBLE "is it can be hugs tiem now pleez?"
      GIMMEH LINE FLUFFYZ
      FLUFFYZ SEZ NO? GTFO. KTXH
      PLZ OPEN FILE "lolcats.jpg"
             AWSUM THX
                  VISIBLE FILE
             O NOES
                  INVISIBLE "Oops!"
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

Hehe, forget Perl. It’s all about the Lolcode..

My favorite t-shirt quotes:

Cuckoo for Cocoa Apps
An Apple a Day, Keeps Windows Away
There’s no place like ~

While sitting down to late afternoon tea last Wednesday, I listened idly to the various exchanges of my fellow colleagues as they began to reminisce about the days way back when, and the shipping of System 7, already sixteen years ago.

“.. and we thought we’d have to bury him in the icon garden,” laughed one woman. My ears perked up. The icon garden?

“Oh, yeah,” said another. When the campus was first built, there was a requirement by the Cupertino city council to have some form of public art on display. “So Apple put up the classic 7 icons..” The cowdog, the pixelated paint brush, the green paint bucket spilling onto the grass..

When Steve Jobs returned in ‘97, the icons were the first to be axed. Then. And now.

After running some errands Saturday morning, I returned home, walking through the courtyard, busily lost in thought, until the voice of a small girl piped up, “I am making a mountain for my brother cause one of the other boys pushed him down.”

I stopped in confusion and focused on a dark-haired Indian girl with a smaller boy in tow. “I’m sorry?” I said.

“Hello!” she chirped.

“Hello!” I replied, pleased beyond measure, although I couldn’t say why.

She began to babble non-stop about the boys who had pushed the little boy down and how she brought him up there and how they were making mountains in the sandy earth, and she was making a moat. I stood there, utterly enchanted by her sparkling brown eyes, her candid talk, and her lyrical Indian accent.

After some minutes, a Chinese couple walked up with their daughter and the little girl turned and started chatting with her friend. I slipped away unnoticed, the widest grin on my face, feeling like the luckiest person on earth.

The first two weeks of home-coming have come and gone. I have my first sun-burn of the summer, after reading Harry Potter by the pool-side all afternoon, but it is good to see some color in my legs again.

I did not expect much to change in three months of absence, yet I have somehow changed and I now see things with differently-colored glasses. I look at the people around me and wonder what their story is, where they came from, and what their dearest wishes are for themselves and their families. I think about my scattered family, scattered possessions, scattered memories, and wonder if I’ll ever truly be ‘home’. My heart and mind feel heavy with confusion, and I wonder what it was that was important, and what is left to take its place.

Angst and a foreboding sense of bereavement walk beside me.