I do not feel good, because everything seems to have gone beyond my control, and in the middle of that chaos was my meticulously attending to every detail in hope of improvement, which neither will be of actual help.
Last time I felt this glum sentiment I remember I spared an hour to sit by the window sill and talk to myself, with an English accent impeccable in the perspective of my surroundings, so that I could feel the superiority and smoke on that. My assumption was that once I escaped the College Entrance Exam, I would be free to devise my future on the blank page, but in fact I put myself in another, more cruel, for it depends of probability, College Application. I shared the disdain of pedantic undergraduate education with my father, I condemned aimlessly whoever I thought was on my way, and the problem retains, seems unsolvable, that chronicle lack of money. I should've been doing thing I'm interested in, installing OS X on the VMWare and solve the iMessage problem with Chameleon, reading novels in Chinese that after all, is my native language, continuing to miss the space after every punctuation and the line after every paragraph… because I don't have to work to obtain a 2000 in SAT, I prefer the depressurized life. But instead I'm working, ensuring, and hypothetically assuming, and worrying about where I'm going.
I think about what if the result turned out in the worst kind, then what should I do, what could I do to compensate for not only the failure of my delusion but also the disappointment, chiding, suspicion from all around me, my circle, and the social crust where I belong. I'm not an itinerant, who have nothing so that he can do anything, try out every way, and ponder the problem without mentioning the consequence. I'm an out-of-box thinker, that's why I'm here writing in English, listening to English radio, and tomorrow morning do English problems, but I'm not an out-side-box doer, that's why I'm doing the same thing. Months ago I made the most courageous decision ever in my life, because I believed that for my courage and sacrifice I should gain something in exchange, something as an institutionalized Chinese high school student will never be able to find out, but I didn't see anything. At school I can be managed, by teacher; at home, I have to manage myself.
I do have alternatives, but that alternative would be a direct proof of the failure of my entire strategy and aspiration. I don't want to allow that to happen, but I have only 15 days to know if it will. I have a sister and a brother who have a very decent and respected life, as a high ranking government official and a famous entrepreneur in Suzhou. But all of my attempt to get in touch with them came to nothing. I don't know if I had overestimated their weigh in the family, or the family's weigh in them. The world is a realistic one, although I claim to adore the romantic and the ideal, like for thousands of years human beings have been adoring, I only see the futility, in a way religious people struggling to prove their God and non-religious people struggling to disapprove it. I'm not measured by what I want to do, but how I can do it and if what I did could be seen as done, and hopefully I would never be measured that way, not only me, but any foreseeable future generation.
When I was taking shower today - absurd as it is picayune, I mocked myself that I only have traits, not capabilities, and the worse is that I'm still making traits to wish the capability coming. The dilemma originated not from me, the murder, nor my family, the victim, but the society's mandate of money as the threshold of everything, which involves some kind of relationship that when I don't understand, but am eager to, and when I do, I no longer care.
The most effective way of deviating from these sensations is probably reading. Fernando Pessoa said that reading is the most agreeable way to escape life. I did allocate 20 minutes to read the book Lying in the Drunken World. The plot, not surprisingly, consists of nothing deep and worth thinking twice. But I'm fascinated by the presence of another world, where everything imaginable not only imagined but also materialized. But after scanning few pages, I'm forced out of that bouncy castle. Because there's always something I shouldn't forget, something a lv 90 in World of Warcraft or a thorough enjoyment of books cannot surrogate. The things depicted in those books, among those pages, are graceful as they're untruthful. Only that I don't really differentiate between the real world and the virtual one when I see no peril imminent in either.
Everyone is perverse to some extent, and that extent is limited. I don't know if understanding the aim for life is happiness means understanding life. I have my mind, disproportionate to my status as it may be, deprived of clear reasoning and the euphoria of simplicity. And being 18 years old already, I don't have a way to truly realize my independence. Reading my classmates' update, I perceived distance; reading the wrinkle on the faces of my parents, siblings, all of them, I saw estrangement. A lot of people defy this inclination by something that endures, I don't exist in those people's world.
I want an iPhone (to replace my current sluggish Android), and a real Mac (to have a real Mac), and a Faber Castell propel pencil (so that my left hand writes more comfortably), and I can't afford them. And when I've gotten them, surely I cannot afford something else.
I want to leave my own country, China, out of disdain of its destruction of the past, of its people, but I can tell myself that I am leaving not for those reasons. I'm leaving because under this institution I cannot succeed, too much of my temperament is at odds with the temperament of this people, and that in United States I might feel better than I do here, where I don't need technological method to bypass the Great Firewall to have Facebook, Twitter, and post this blog. Or I will feel not necessarily better, since I've seen always those rich guys are not happy at all. But I cannot check the impulse of becoming rich first and maybe returning to poor then. I know there's a different between peasant and peasant-entrepreneur-peasant.
I do have nothing but the harsh reality that thwarted that nothing, and I'll have nothing. But at least at this moment, when I'm 18 years old, I'm not succumbing, and am doing what I want to do, and that's it, it serves my desire, albeit nonsensical. And after that, I might be one of the Big Green, one of the Wall Street, and one of the eco fanatics, or an ordinary office clerk stuck in downtown Wuxi city forever. I could be everything that varies by possibility, but I won't forget that I don't have my 18th birthday because I tried to implement those sentiments, that I bear something more important in mind, to give my life a meaning, delusional, meaningless meaning that I can live by just like I comply with a creed. No more proof, only that belief, that right now sitting on this chair that had been sat on since the beginning of this day, I'm trying my very best to practice English, to get it done, and to perfect the starting part of my life's journey.
God bless me and my dream, AMEN!
