Terrible, thanks for asking.

“So, how is working from home going?”

If you happen to be one of the millions like me who has been stuck working from home, chances are that you’ll have been asked this question quite often lately. And even if you’re totally dying inside, you just say “fine,” so everyone can go about their day, right? When you’re entering your third (3rd!) month of working from home (that’s nine weeks for you folks who after childbirth reflexively insist on telling us that little Bryan or Alexia is 30,4 weeks old and not 7 months) it’s a question that while innocuous on the surface can actually incite deep bouts of self-reflection, which in turn can make you understand your life is a total, complete and entire mess spiralling entirely out of control towards an absolute state of total mental entropy. But so is everyone else’s. So cool. Coolcoolcool.

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The Nod

Social conventions are a funny things aren’t they?

The Oxford English dictionary defines a ‘clique’ as “a small close-knit group of people who do not readily allow others to join them”  Life is populated with these cliques, and you usually tend to evolve through them gradually, as life passes by.

Entering one of the oldest, most archaic social circles in the world was probably one of the most daunting things I ever had to do in my life. Few societies are more archaic, custom-based and relying on limitless respect for your elders as a Bar Association. Upon my first introduction to this society a few years ago when I joined the Antwerp Bar, I quickly found myself hopelessly lost in the indecipherable ocean of age-old customs, social faux-pas, unwritten rules, and mute understandings. Do I bow? Courtsy? Jump? Bark?!

Addicted to Addiction

Plata o Plomo? 

Sleep or no sleep?

It was 3.21 A.M. Everything in the building was as silent as a tomb, except for the sound of the ventilator in my laptop which was wheezing like an asthma patient during a marathon. My eyes were fatigued by the blue, fluorescent light emanated by my laptop screen depriving me of my precious melatonin and throwing my circadian rhythm more out of whack than a smile in North Korea. My arm was going numb every five minutes from the weight of my head resting on it. My neck had given up on supporting my upper-body cerebral Kinder Surprise in this 45-degree inclined angle a long time ago, and rested in the pillow that had now permanently taken the shape of a dried taco-chip. My mouth had grown as dry as the Atacama desert, my eyes as tired as the weary doctor ending his graveyard-shift. I was just about to embark on the 10th episode of Netflix’s latest form of legal drug, Narcos. ‘Just one more, I’m almost at the end’ I pleaded with myself like a cheap crack-whore looking for a quick fix in the dark and somber alley called Bingestreet.

It was then, at that very moment in between episodes, when Netflix was purging the last bytes of the old episode and preloading the new one, that it promptly asked the completely rhetorical and self-exploring question:

“Are you sure you’re still watching “Narcos?”

I’ve already told you that my biggest fear for the future is sassy programming, and now my reaction could only be summarized (in a thematically correct way) like :

CSI? More like CSWHY?

In 2016, 3 things seem to keep propagating as fast as a bad case of ebola, and all of them are as annoying as having to fart whilst out for a spacewalk in your EVA-suit. Every week at least one of these three things happen : either a new Kardashian pops up somewhere doing something unimportant and instagrams it ,or a new case of Zika-fever pops up or finally (and most likely) a new CSI/NCIS spin-off premieres on some channel.

I mean seriously, the last spin-off, CSI/NCIS New Orleans should have been the one to finish them all. No, that’s no joke, there is an entire (sub)series dedicated to crime solving in New Orleans. What marketing genius over at the studios woke up one day and thought “You know what I bet people want to see? Crimes being solved in New Orleans”. New fucking Orleans. I mean come on.

This is in fact not an internet-generated joke, but a real show. Well, show…