This time I begin the work log at the pool. I felt like I had been hit by a train this morning, the body aching all over because I overexercised yesterday. I'll give my body a break today, biking will be done at a leisurely pace, and I will engage in no form of endurance or strength training.

What needs to be accomplished today? Today I am not sure. I'll just dive into the codebase and see what happens.

Work session 1 (30 min)

I was able to resolve some further bugs. It seems I'm warming up to the codebase and it becomes more intuitive with use. A bug that took me considerable debugging effort involved removing the reliance on private properties (_) of an object. Things are learned by trial and error. I've kept the work session short because I will not be able to focus here for much longer. I'll move work to a library after stretching and dipping in the pool.

I came to Ana María Matute library in Carabanchel. I hadn't been here before, it's a nice modern library, but architecturally it's a disaster. It would seem that the intention was to have three entrances, but I infer that this would require more staff and only one entrance is open (the least convenient and hidden one). The other two entrances have prominent signs directing you to the open one. Too much signage is unequivocally a symptom of bad (or misused) architecture.

At this moment I have a nice view of Madrid in front of me. Perfect for work. Let's get down to business...

Work session 2 (1h 30 min)

Nice focused work. Just all around the place refactoring code. Hadn't had a flowing work session in a couple of days. Hope is restored.

I went to a different pool after the work session. At the entrance, I found former workmates from Cabify, and I joined them. We had a good time playing a card game that's called "liar", and the mechanics of the game involve a lot of lying, of course. The game intrigued me because it made me notice I have become accustomed to evade lying, and that threw off the other players because I'd only lie if I truly needed to, not as an element of strategy. Some years ago I decided to try out what would happen if I didn't lie, and when a difficult situation showed up I'd make an effort towards being honest. Now, I don't consider this moral high ground, from experience it felt very clearly that lying was the easy thing to do in the short term, but in the long term you carried an "honesty debt" which you had to keep track of. Honesty was a means of simplification.

But, in some situations lying was not only merited but necessary, and I'd lie noticing why I had done so, and I'd deal with the debt as soon as possible. An example: my mother asked if I had smoked pot, I responded "no" without hesitating. Why? I later reflected that if she dug more, I'd have to lie about the frequency. "Ah, if I smoked sporadically I'd be able to tell my mother the truth, so this is the correct direction".

In the end I lost a match not because I didn't lie, but because of my habit of honesty I didn't notice I had a winning hand and gave the match to my opponent in a very naive way. I see it as the moral dilemma of stealing an expensive life-saving medicine for somebody who will die if he doesn't have it, except you are so focused on the conundrum of stealing that you don't notice there's a box lying on the street.

We seem to lie a lot out of habit, and the cure to this is conscious honesty. But once the habit is uprooted, conscious honesty is a burden. If the Nazis ask you if you're hiding Jews, you lie. If a border agent asks how long are you staying, you lie. If you play a game of lying, you lie.