The Art of the Sunday Drift: Tattoos, Somun, and the Quiet Logic of Pause
Sunday in Jefferson City doesn’t ask anything of you. Not even politeness. It simply offers itself—barefoot, unshaved, a bit sun-dappled and unapologetic.I used to think of this day as a buffer. A prelude. The calendar’s layover between chaos and order. But recently I’ve started treating Sunday not as space before the “real work,” but as the realest work itself. A quiet reckoning. A soft reset.There’s ritual in the rhythm. Somun warming in the oven like a Balkan memory baked into Missouri air. The steam rising—a ghost from Belgrade kitchens, carried through time and topography. On some Sundays, I trace the tattoos on my arm like stories I’ve archived on skin. They’re not just ink; they’re institutional footnotes I chose for myself. Some aesthetic, some symbolic, some just because silence needed a companion.And maybe that’s what Sunday is—a tattoo you don’t show off, but wear anyway. Slow hikes that don’t record steps. Coffee sipped without purpose. The kind of pause where your brain finally finishes what Monday started but never resolved.In a week full of workflows, Sunday is the only one without automation. And yet it moves us more than any trigger, any flowchart, any perfectly documented process.
The SharePoint Cipher
📚 “Thes SharePoint Cipher”It started with a late-night workflow breakdown in the heart of KU’s institutional jungle. Vladimir had just wrapped the latest LMS updates and a survey logic fix when a rogue Power Automate flow triggered an alert: “Unauthorized data call from ATLAS branch node.”Most would brush it off as a glitch. But Vladimir? He knew his architecture like a chef knows his mise en place. That flag shouldn’t exist. By 7:00 p.m., he was knee-deep in metadata breadcrumbs and reCAPTCHA anomalies, until—boom—one JSON array spat out coordinates that weren’t locations at all. They were dates. Historical dates. Serbian resistance movements. And hidden in the comment field? Cyrillic phrases translated only by someone who knew both the culture and the code.He leaned back, cracked open a jar of his homemade ajvar, and dipped in warm somun, letting the smoky pepper bite sharpen his thoughts. Then his fingers traced the ink on his forearm: a compass wrapped in circuitry. Not a decoration, but a map. The dates matched tattoos across his body—each one a commit point in his life’s version control.Fast forward: he decrypted the flow, found that a former colleague had baked legacy data into the ATLAS landing page as a farewell. But instead of clutter, they’d hidden pearls—forgotten access grants, deprecated institutional knowledge, and embedded messages only decipherable through technical fluency and cultural memory.Vladimir published the cleaned page by midnight, preserving the best of the old within the rigor of the new. Before bed, he fired off a short email with documentation—just the essentials. And maybe a little extra.Subject: “Resolved: Legacy Logic Artifact”Attachments: Tattoo Reference Map (encrypted); Ajvar Recipe (.doc)Because sometimes, tech isn’t just about clean handoffs—it’s about knowing the story behind the scars.🎬 “The SharePoint Cipher” — Graphic Short Breakdown🔹 Title Screen• Style: Neo-noir digital meets Balkan folklore
• Imagery: Forearm tattoo glowing faintly with circuit patterns, overlay of SharePoint UI fragments and Serbian glyphs
• Palette: Midnight blues, grayscale gradients, bright red highlights🔹 Scene 1: Institutional Ghosts• Setting: KU server room, dimly lit with the hum of old machines
• Action: Vladimir traces a JSON anomaly to a ghost flow echoing through ATLAS
• Dialog Balloon: “This flag isn’t just rogue code—it’s a memory.”
• Overlay: Workflow logic visualized as haunted threads across campus infrastructure🔹 Scene 2: Cipher Table• Setting: Home desk, ajvar jar, somun steam rising
• Detail Shot: Ajvar spoon stirring beside a decrypted survey schema
• Tattoo Frame: Each mark lights up as he scans coordinates from the data
• Quote: “The commit points weren’t timestamps—they were history.”🔹 Scene 3: Flashback Merge• Setting: Split between Belgrade and Lawrence, memory overlays during code review
• Panels: Inked resistance dates superimposed over deprecated web forms
• Mood: Quiet respect for legacy, tension of carrying it forward🔹 Scene 4: Deployment & Reveal• Action: Vladimir hits “Publish,” ATLAS glows with new clarity
• UI Frame: Revamped landing page, subtle watermark of compass circuitry
• Dialog Balloon: “Preservation doesn’t mean nostalgia—it means rigor.”
• Email Panel: Screenshot of his email, attachment icon with “Ajvar Recipe.doc”🔹 Final Frame• Close-up: His forearm resting on keyboard, glow faded, smoke rising from ajvar
• Caption: “Some document history is inked in flesh, not folders.”
