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{ September 22, '98 }
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An abandoned habit
Having a new Internet account makes it practical again to keep a daily journal on the net. For months, I was in contact with computers only at work, with no e-mail at home; I was exiled from the Internet. In the meantime, I've changed jobs, addresses, and lifestyles.
Cressida Corporation, a food processing and chemicals manufacturer in Honduras, is my new employer. For the last two months, I have been learning to program in ABAP-4, a reporting and dialog processing language written to control R/3. R/3 is a colossal software system, written by a company called SAP, from Walldorf, Germany. The system handles almost every database-related computer application a company might have, stores gobs of data, and is practically platform-independent.
In June, my new company called me for several interviews, and since it is six hours away from where I was, land travel took its toll on me. I tired of writing journal entries on paper, to later type and post them. I then tired of typing entries wherever I was and posting them afterwards. All was useless. Posting a daily entry had become cumbersome, time-consuming, and an outright chore. The guilt of skipping the journal for days, and then weeks, mounted for a while until it calloused.
For now, my new home is Tegucigalpa, the cubist anthill I wrote about earlier; I am very blessed here. After a few transitional months, I finally have my own apartment. Even better, I'm making new friends, and starting to feel at home. For the moment, volleyball and music are my minor obsessions; I have much to learn in both of them, and friends who can help me in each of them.
Routine is becoming common in all I do. On Wednesdays I meet with my Bible study group; on Fridays, I practice with the church music group; on Saturdays I worship at the church meeting; Every Sunday I do laundry and sometimes play sports.
On workdays I wake up at six, pray, shower, dress, eat, and walk down the steep hill where live. I then car-pool with a friend to work, and arrive promptly 5 minutes late. If one of us wakes up a bit earlier than usual, we meet on the hill, or I walk down to his house and we leave for work, and arrive at seven-thirty on the dot. At twelve I look for him again and we drive home; I crawl uphill and have lunch, then climb back down at 1:10 and car-pool again. At last, at five-thirty, I take the bus home to freedom, for my friend sometimes leaves later, and I seldom yet have to work late.
Finally, an abandoned habit rises from the dead: writing an entry to my journal. May this habit live on while it is still fun, and may that be for long.
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email me at aeortiz@iname.com.
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