Music…

Don’t You (Forget About Me)

The Breakfast Club Soundtrack

Simple Minds
and Words

Hey, hey, hey, hey!

Hey, hey, hey, hey!

Won’t you come see about me?
I’ll be alone, dancing, you know it, baby
Tell me your troubles and doubts
Giving me everything inside and out

Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.


On a crisp Tuesday morning, I walk the short distance from my building to the nearby building with the cafeteria.  I settle on a familiar table in a section of the large room.  The dining room is sparsely populated; the collections of people resemble islands in an archipelago in a sea of tables.  I walk the short distance to the grill station where I order breakfast on the kiosk, typically an omelet and a side of hashbrowns.  I proceed to the espresso stand, where I order my tall latte and a pastry, often a bacon maple bar.  Now, I play a tranquil waiting game; it’s a race between getting the coffee, the food, or my friends arriving.

Slowly people drift in and sit down.  Some walk directly from their cars to the cafeteria; they place their coats and bags next to the table as they sit down.  Having arrived at work earlier, others wander from their office to the cafeteria.  We may talk about anything and often do.  Topics typically center around technology and news.  Occasionally, we bring up current projects; oftentimes, having a diverse set of geeks as a sounding board for designs or approaches.  Sometimes we chat about deeply personal topics which dominate our attention.

Continue reading “The Breakfast Club”

Music…

Veinte Millas

20 Millas

Flans
and Words

Me pides más
Después te vas
Indecisión, contradicción
Tus temores anclados en mi amor

No arriesgas nunca el corazón
Siempre adelante la razón
Robas mis fantasías con tu voz

Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.


On a typical afternoon, I sit on a wooden table in our library.  The Ritcher Library, the main library at the University of Miami, sits centrally on campus.  Mere minutes separate this library and our cluster of classrooms and the student union.  Most of us meet in The Zoo, the large meeting room just off the main entrance.  Two walls of this room are lined with windows to the exterior of the building.  Hence any student could glance into The Zoo and see if our friends had yet to arrive.  In the dark days of the late 80’s and early 90’s, e-mail and mobile phones were rare, so we relied on verbal coordination.

The second floor was reserved mostly for periodicals.  My friend Max, short for Marisela, worked at the periodical counter.  I met her in engineering school.  She is bright, soft-spoken, and funny.  She’s Mexican, and we often speak in Spanish.  A short distance from the periodicals sat a small computer lab, reserved mostly for word processing.  I’ll occasionally reboot the computer and run my programming tools instead (Turbo Pascal), finding an alternate place to accomplish my work.

Continue reading “My imperfect romance with language and culture”