4/3

Before I am admitted into a college, going to a high school is the first priority; and before that, middle school; elementary school; kindergarten; mama; and milk. After I'm admitted into a college, going to a graduate school is the first priority; and after that, doctorate; job; marriage; kids with divorce (maybe); retirement plan; retirement; death. In every frame of reference there seems to be something in the past left undone, or in the future to be done. Lucky people achieve each of their goals; unlucky ones don't and usually weep at it. The extent to which I understand these is shocking, yet the forgetfulness to which I neglect them is just as so. When Gao asked me via the iMessage - he is a high school student with much more hope than I had college entrance exam - about whether he should retake the test after June - should it went bad. I saw an exact replica of myself one year ago. By then I could in no way predict the outcome; by now he can in no way predict the same. However, the science fiction writer Liu Cixin, whose book Three Body I was reading ten minutes ago, went studying chemistry in his college. He aspired to be a chemist yet ended up a fiction writer. It must sound like a dismay to him when he was filling out the college application. But everything worked out for him eventually. In a shadowy corner of some lesser known country, a pseudo-existent kid aspired to be the CEO of Morgan Stanley and died in a slum, or in a war with NATO, or in a terrorist attack he planned against the more conservative faction of a street gang. I reserve the right to say, hey, you see that's not a good ending for him. But it's never up to me, or anyone to judge. Maybe in a micro second before his death he suddenly understood the meaning of life and therefore the little penalty is worth it. It's up to the collective mishmash of human chaos, the inexorable opinion of society - the most delicate organization of matter so far in the known universe to do that.

I remember someone said on the CUUS forum, the most valuable thing one can acquaint in this process is those fellows who accompanied you. Yeah, indeed I met Liu Chang and Dream and Mark and Rabbit and Lullaby and Gao and Night and Yuzi and Babyface. But I'm also sure the occasion in which I write or remember all those names is the last one in my life. I don't know how Fernando Pessoa was writing during his freshman year, or James Joyce, or any author I have adored. The richness of a particular skill or the lack thereof can both be viewed as a positive characteristic - Churchill with his V sign backward or the rest of human race? The question is dumb - but it possesses the potency to put the most fundamental rule of modern society into suspicion - Churchill invented the gesture; the rest of us are simply trying to replicate it. So whenever one puts up a V sign in front of a camera, Churchill becomes a superior being. Everyone is created equal they said - no, never, someone has died in their mom's uterus; some has died during delivery; some was born caesarean style; some natural child birth. And many listened to Bach and many listened to gunshots. Fuck it, equality, fuck it.

Steve Jobs is a legendary entrepreneur and his products cost money! Ha-ha, for some reason it always amuses me.

Lately I was trying to learn German via Duolingo: it's my conviction that if I want to stay in Germany, I have to learn German. I've learned Das Brot; Ich bin gut; Du bist ein Mann. And they constitute my knowledge of the language. Yet I feel exactly the same when I'm using das Brot and necropolis and anthropomorphism. Exactly the same! That's the wonderful part, I acquire something, and forget it. The process doesn't have anything to do with the quality of my acquisition, but with the act of gaining something itself - be it a piece of shit or a bag of gold - only preconception at work, no objective judgement. So yeah, everyone, at every moment, is actually feeling an equal amount of goodness, or badness, depending on how you look at it.

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A woman on the internet is asking, how not to feel pain when giving childbirth. She just can't reach the conclusion that child itself is entirely optional. That's how, peer pressure, paternal and maternal instinct, tradition restrain us.