11/2

Perhaps adulthood isn't so much measured by age, but by distance from the last folly. The follies in my life so far have been at first unknowingly carried out, and then with time, more intently done. But as of late, I can't quite recall when the last folly was. It probably wasn't even in this country. Over time I have learned to sense where things are going, and to believe what I sense, and very few things, especially humanly ones, manage to surprise me. Hence I simply more or less successfully maneuver around what's ahead of me based on what has and has not worked in the past. In my maneuvers there are not exquisite strategies or exact calculations. Reality often does not require such strategies and calculations to find its way. If it does, then it often means it isn't reality - it is rather my will imposed on it. Reality needs simple things, nice words for the ego, uttered through smiley eyes, feigned knowledge, demonstrated through pretty formats, and an unwavering commitment to remain agreeable, especially socially. The paradigm is widely applicable, I needn't engage too much of my mind. From this vantage point, things are not only manageable but also quite predictable. I maybe have finally understood what "overthinking" means - a unique form of hubris in the belief that one could reconcile reality with belief, rather than the other way around. In overthinking there has been much anguish that has been present for the better part of my life. By shedding that hubris, everything has felt way better. Even in the entire routine of my current walk of life, going to the office, coming back from the office, waiting for the weekend, enjoying the weekend, and getting two paychecks every month, there isn't much friction. It does not mean that friction does not spring into existence. It's just that I have become quite good at nullifying it as it pops up. I do it in the same way a cat licks itself, along the fur and not against it. And I judge the outcome by whether the fur has been straightened and disaster averted, and not through value lenses like honesty, integrity, skepticism, which are anyways dubious, overly grandiose words in the context of the current day and age.

I can however notice that many people still view the world through the many lenses they wear. And these are all different lenses. Some are a rose-tinted pair to show certain things in certain colors; some are rather magnifying glasses or kaleidoscopes that either needlessly exaggerate or abstractly complicate. Some are even just straight up projectors. And what they have seen might have gratified or disturbed them quite a bit. I used to have many pairs of them in the past, but at the moment, due to the increased eye fatigue from everything I saw, I have not worn anything, I have just my own naked eyes which make everything kind of blurry due to the good-old myopia. Sometimes I even close my eyes, as many things aren't meant to be seen, and at the same time, there are many things I would prefer not to see. Then I'll open my eyes, and go about my days amongst the blurry things. This approach has served me quite well at the present.

Adulthood, isn't it nice?

8/27

The stone house up the hill alongside Mill Plain Rd is quiet at night. When it was deep summer, the window air conditioner made a constant hum. But summer is inching to a close, the air conditioner is off now. If I listen closely, however, I can hear cars going about on I-95 which isn't super far away. The thin glass door which is also my window does not block off sound well - it does not need to, in fact, silence is not quite the absence of sound, but rather the abundance of scattered, far away rumbles. Within the stone house inside the room where I routinely sit, words and voices are heard rarely, and only through either the Sony portable speaker connected to my phone, or built-in speakers of my laptop. At the push of a button, whichever words and voices that were uttered at said time would pause and then not resume for a long time, or resume but with an entirely different tone, narrating an entirely different subject. The algorithm that produces the content on the web nowadays ensures that content is abundant enough that it is practically infinite for a human lifespan. The tradeoff would then be between the natural quietness of the stone house and its surroundings and the artificial festivities of whatever the algorithm decides to spit out. But the reality in here, I observe, is more rotational, with each option taking turns governing the room. In between the turns the stone house and the room in it sometimes feel like the central pillar of existence of this reality, through the alternating Boolean states of noise and silence, activity and tranquility, they produce and encapsulate everything that at least, given the constraint of reasonableness, is at all possible. Thoughts which only sporadically sizzle up, get mixed with them like spices on a rotisserie chicken, making up a whole and coherent culinary package. But "feel like" is never "is", the same way that "want" does not align with "get", and "need" with "have".

The stone house and its room are only part of a constellation of things that are far more grandiose and riled up. These are, for example, the corporate office that I subscribe to, the people in it, the Metro-North Railroad and the not-so-distant NYC, friends that I like a little bit, somewhat, or a lot, and the martinis, karaokes, lights that represent a roster of people that I have not even come across. In between the other things are the stone house and its room, or in between the stone house and its room are the other things. Whichever they are, their totality nourishes, chastises, educates, and eventually, assimilates me like how eyeglasses gradually become one with the person wearing them. At the beginning of each day my exit from the stone house and the room is my entrance to perhaps other houses and other rooms; and at the end of each day my entrance to the stone house and the room is an exit from other houses and other rooms. I exit, I enter, on repeat, days into weeks into months into years, and finally into decades that take up increasingly sizable chunks of my life's surface area. More and more things gradually start to make sense; more and more things gradually stop. Or more precisely speaking, fewer and fewer things are categorically definable. Things and the people creating them are coalescing into a blend of non-descript gray, around which tokenized viewpoints, emotions, and many humanly or animalistic ideals swirl around like how the myriad gas clouds, star systems, and the dusts around them orbit a galactic center.

Amidst the stone house and its room, I sit stately without committing to any interpretation of truth. The absence of the hum of the air conditioner in the background has made the room feel suddenly smaller. If previously I felt I was viscerally connected to it in some way, now I no longer feel like it. Its darkened physical boundaries have faded with nothing to replace them. As a matter of fact, I am not connected to anything. Relative to the cosmic microwave background I am moving through space at a rough speed of 370km/s, a number when timed by the seconds elapsed since when past events have occurred or until when future events will occur would explain the distance I am away from them. For now, sheltered by the stone house and its room, I sit stately.

8/14

After some time I will have to admit that there is not really a core storyline behind my many moves in the past 10 odd years. For sure, I have planned each of them meticulously, with a certain stringency that a good, steady life is not supposed to entail. However, at least in this moment, in one of the 4th-floor rooms of a stroad-side hotel in Danbury, Connecticut, I cannot really ascribe a character to the outcomes of my plan, all the while the years increasingly speed by. In Munich, I have a weekly routine that basically zigzags between the office, the Asian supermarket at Rosenheimer Platz, and my apartment, that is soon going to morph into one between the office, the Chinatown at Flushing, Queens, and my apartment. More words or even sections will appear on my LinkedIn profile, which, no matter how hard I tell ChatGPT to furnish with a better variety of English, remains quite dull. Yet, everything else that I have once held dear, the literary things, the metaphorical objects, and abstract emotions that are only felt in deep thoughts, has not managed to influence my LinkedIn profile but vice versa. Reality, or at a more personal level, realist thinking, seems to have definitively won out. Paraphrases include empiricism, pragmatism, maturity, the way it is, rationality, and FIRE. But I do not even know when the battle was fought, or what exactly is the side that has lost the war. Maybe the losing side has become the winning side, or maybe there was no battle at all. Regardless of what it was, all of it has happened in an instant of the 10 odd years, the youth of a single person.

In retrospect, there has been a great irony, one of a journey that had started in idealism, fantasy, and pursuits of things that go beyond the mundanity of what used to be my day-to-day life, and a journey that only started because it was at all costs, somehow ventured into an unknown place that feels eerily familiar. It has a different character of course, like how Germany is different from China and from the US, lifestyles, cultures, traditions and all that, but the struggle of living a life without knowing what end it has, and the toll of this thing I still don't get, "adult life", are largely the same, if not weighing down more heavily than before. Russ, my future boss, after hearing me saying that my original destination before going to Germany was the US, remarked, what a detour that was. And indeed, what a detour that was, and what a detour everything was. Maybe it is not that everything is a detour, but that nowhere is home. Most insidiously, the existence of home could be contextual. It might have only existed, amongst many other things, when I believed in them. Like a neatly built sand castle on the beach, it readily melts away after one or two waves of reality. But, after having spent 28 years being alive, and more than 10 years trying to find some sort of corroboration of what I had believed in, the search and rescue effort perhaps needs to come to a close, or at least be shelved. In my life thus far there aren't many such things as successes and failures - things happen and I am a good pupil.

Only in rarified moments, I shut the bathroom door, put my AirPods on, sit down on the toilet and listen to punk rock of which I used to be an avid fan. In those moments even the punk rock feels a tad dry, but still, two or three minutes in after the warm up, I bang my head a little.

9/27

Lately I haven't gotten to write a whole lot. And whatever I do write feels increasingly like it is written with the trembling hands of a Parkinson's patient. The closer I examine it, in words' and paragraphs' distinct lines and blocks, the more it stands out to me as some combination of background noises that seem to vaguely depict something, only to distract from a deeper, indescribable vacuity. I juxtapose arrays upon arrays of metaphors, objects, fragments of thoughts and try clumsily to weave them together into a picture that lacks context but nevertheless seeks to disturb emotionally - like a doodle of a kindergartener with very strange color choices that I don't understand, mirroring some subset of perceptions of reality, which, equally, I don't understand. And in a way, this is precisely the point. The formation of the letters and the arrangement of them, aim to amplify a residual pain which almost goes away as the normal range of human needs, e.g. hunger, greed, and the need to pee, emerge and subside. I invent them, in the same way a space exploration game invents procedurally generated side quests. These are the tissue sperms, the muscles pushing against the wall, and the jitters of electrical signals emanating from a warm corpse.

And I come back to them, to the graveyard of scrapped thoughts, to their malady and disrepair. Not to commemorate the futility as they are, but to ritually show up, as the regular alcoholic of the Biergarten, drinking to the bitterness of the many days and nights with the clash and clangs of syllables to toast. Perhaps, it is not so much that these non-thoughts are drawing me in, but rather what they represent, a fading era, in which, I, unemployed and therefore unburdened, would sit down every once in a while to record life as I saw it then, and the fact that those things that I have once seen and sought to remember by writing them down, are now only remembered with a strange clarity that dissects everything vividly, yet at the same time, to which I do not so much relate. Therefore, similar to a middle aged man, clad in suit, returning to the dance floor of his favorite night club, I return to this blog, with the addressable concerns I had back then mostly addressed, to write something as a token of me still being around, if only less vivaciously. It might have something to do with the nature of the adult life, of the emergent callousness and indifference after having been marinated with the many expected and unexpected lectures on the perils of naivety. The space for strategic maneuvers and make-belief passions feels slimmer - a twenty-seven year-old single male, a back office corporate finance worker, and a resident of suburban Munich, all of these labels take up precious space of my life's character count, leaving me little room to freestyle the twists and turns without them appearing too abrupt. And hence, I simply extend the storyline by inserting one modifier here, and another metaphor there. I am a playwright of the Season IIs.

In the evenings when I am alone, I sometimes feel homesick, but not for any of the cities where I come from or have been, because none of them interests me any more. The parties I had in them have been over, the door of the departing Uber has been shut, and the last message has been left at read. I have turned around, and to turn back would mean that the only thing I would find is their absence. And in theory I shouldn't feel homesick because everything I am homesick for resides in my brain, which has become a Möbius strip of home and the sickness for it.

So not knowing whether it's the home or the sickness for it, I stare at the dimly lit wall as blankly as I have done a gazillion times before and after, as if still puzzled, as if still trying.

10/26

In the "About" section of my website, one of the introductory sentences reads "during my free time, I maintain a blog", and above this segment of texts hangs an avatar, in which a generic anime .png of a blonde guy, who's not me, sits smilingly in front of a laptop. I know the reason I put up that picture - it is an anime figure, thus more approachable, and it is a static image of a person, so no effort is required for it to project a sense of optimism through an impeccable smile and wide gazing eyes. I'd like to look at the "About" section quite often, not to be impressed at its adherence to material design nor to polish up its terse, corporate speak, but to look at the website as how a constrained shop window would look to a passer-by. Its décor of colors, lights, and softened edges blend into the techno-selling-points of most things today, and mask everything that was left behind.

In the past I would be quick to ridicule this. But then I realize that such a reaction is illogical - I am typing on a keyboard, in front of a screen, on a chair, under a warm rooftop in the pre-winter cold, all of which are incremental results of a bullet point here, a punch line of a joke there, and the fonts, wording and colors used in some copies of .pdfs whose ultimate printed forms I do not see. By day I am that anime guy with a smile trying to project the same sense of the same things with a more spotted skin and a less styled haircut. By night the smile wanes and I start pacing around in a room which is desolate weren't it for me and a few scattered-around things. And in these gaps between working days something sometimes finds room to exist very briefly like faint glitters finding the dark how amidst the darkness there are lights being turned on in my neighbor's bathroom - I don't know what it is. I used to describe it with phrases like human willpower, nostalgia, etc., but none is accurate because of it being rather sentimental and anthropocentric. It is something statistical and universal, similar to a trough of a wave between peaks that very soon oscillates away. In these constant back-and-forth transitions, I end up feeling like how a dung beetle, who can bury dung 250 times its own body mass in one night, would feel like, if it takes a pause and examines passingly the fact that it is moving dung around. And by all means the dung beetle wouldn't stop after the said examination, at the maximum it'll perhaps move the dung a bit more half-heartedly, because evolutionarily that is how the parameters are set for it.

And in this sense the order of events that kicks off with me logging into the computer in the morning as "DE2FEA" and ends with me lying horizontally in bed in the evening starts to make sense, in the same way that the projected optimism in the avatar of my website morphs into a more believable version given enough time and a flashier design language. The nuances of each day and the pursuits of each era are different but on an aggregate level, they involve food, mating, and some play, nothing more and nothing less. And at the end of the day some of these aspects are just commemorated by either a website, or a piece of paper, or spoken words, or muscles and girths; many are just not.

So yes, a beetle, buries dung 250 times the body weight one night every night, and rolls some of the more okayish balls, under the Milky Way.

6/1

A few days ago a large crane fly got into my room, I sprayed some pesticide on it. It did not immediately die and instead struggled to fly away. So I sprayed some more pesticide on it, and then it died.

3/31

Sometimes I like to sit vacantly on the eastern end of the bed. I look at my skin and the random grooves on it which I was never aware of, and my consciousness would gradually recede to reveal the naked mechanicality of my life, in which on a daily basis I internally repeat the process of asking some random questions, providing no answers, and then conjuring up an off-topic speech to make a non-related point. Usually before long the big screen will be turned on, people will begin to sing or talk very loudly until the screen is turned off again. This is not to say that the line of events being kicked off afterwards are identical. The color of the sky, the growth of the weed on the balcony, the mood, the professional goal I have in mind, the genre of the music in the background, and the return of the stock portfolio all change numerously, even kaleidoscopically. However, at times these changes feel like the character configuration screen of an old Japanese RPG, where there are a rotating roster of gender, race, hair color, nose size, and a pool of skill points waiting to be distributed across some traits.

Occasionally things that do not fit to the theme pop up. Some of them are once mundane images of me walking down the street with a cup of latte macchiato in hand, of me getting off a car near a restaurant in a distant city, or of me peeling grapefruits - as the timeline deepens these images invariably become more succinct. The others are not images, but rather traces of smell and pieces of sound that I cannot decipher. All of them pop up very abstractly. Like the quantum fluctuations of the Higgs field. They come into existence and then disappear the same way, without context, only that I am left feeling a bit hollowed in their aftermath. I drag myself back to what I eminently and immediately have in order to shrug off the hollowness - what’s in this room and the strand of life this room represents, and realize that whatever I seem to have are not ammunitions that would help me fend off anything, but rather the hollowness itself. Far removed from when the images, smells and sounds were real, I’m left sitting by myself, like a lone passenger on a one-way train leaving his favorite city. I try to soften my posture a little so that my ass and back are less sore, only to collapse in bed and to begin to feel a little afraid.

I remember as a kid I used to go through one nightmare repeatedly, the exact content of which I have never pinned down - in it there is a dark and infinite unwinding, and nothing from this entire universe can escape from it. I could never bear witnessing it unfold entirely so I would abruptly wake up. And upon seeing the many lights and shadows that surround me from everywhere in the room, I would think that the unwinding had followed me, piercing the boundary between dream and reality. A fearful kid I was, I could only cry and fret aimlessly. Luckily the soft soothing voice of my mom, who was then a lot younger and always by me, would calm me down. She would pat me on the shoulder and put me back to sleep, and everything would once again seem fine. Many years later in another moment as I lie on a different bed, the vague fear has started to creep back. Only then I had my mother’s soft voices. Now those voices are gone. Not only that, the myriad of things that have taken place since those voices are likewise gone. All of my grandparents have died; and my mother is becoming frailer, while I stronger. I went from playing basketball with friends from my local high school to working out of an office with international colleagues, from kissing the one girl in my life without any reservation to lying alone in bed with all of the internal restraints of a calculating adult. And it seems that the unwinding has still followed. No longer a kid I am, I cannot cry and fret tonight. Only somewhere inside me the hollowness grows.

A column of shadow is being cast on the wall by the moonlight. Its black, geometric shape is a monolith with an unknown purpose. And the room where I am is left without a sound.