ABSTRACT
My daily routine starts with loud knocking on my door. I hear my grandmother giving me a couple of minutes notice to get ready and start my daily chores. It is 8 a.m. and we are having breakfast and drinking black coffee. Every day we sit in the same room in exactly the same places that we have done for the past 28 years. She has done this for longer, but I wasn’t alive then. It is not a pleasure to live with my grandmother. If I am a program, her house is an operating system and she is a software architect. There are very strict rules, after all, she grew up in a different system where rules were never to be disobeyed. You can feel a regime in our house. She executes commands and I follow them. I love discipline and routine. I find comfort in repetition and in invisible codes of discipline and rules, it keeps me sane and her satisfied. Her desires are controlled. There is a precise time and occasion in the day when she has her cigarette; when she reads; and when she sleeps. I have to say that I admire that. She never speaks of doing, she executes.
