Oh joy I think what I was working on is working for real. Coding sucks while yer actually coding but seeing results is just great. Really. Not, like, really great but just great.
…
Suddenly I caught myself thinking about fruit and about how nothing had changed. We had thought that after the revolution peaches would be different--bigger, sweeter, more golden. But as I stood in line at a stall in the street market I noticed that the peaches were just as green, small, and bullet-hard, somehow pre-revolutionary... What did change were the faces of the politicians on TV, the names of the major streets and squares, the flags, national anthems, and monuments...as if forty-five years of living under communism cannot be erased from our collective consciousness with a substitution... I understand that in the West today 'the end of communism' has become a stock phrase, a truism, a common expression supposed to indicate the current state of things in Eastern Europe. It sounds marvelous when you hear it in political speeches or read it in the newspapers. The reality is that communism persists in the way people behave, in the looks on their faces, in the way they think...The end of communism is still remote because communism, more than a political ideology or a method of government, is a state of mind...[people] have so deeply incorporated a particular set of values, a way of thinking and of perceiving the world, that exorcising this way of being will take an unforseeable length of time... We may have survived communism, but we have not yet outlived it.
–from M and my current evening read, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavanka Drakulic (a Croatian author)