2/20

Arbitraging on the internet has been something I intended to do but haven't dared to venture thus far. However, since yesterday after I successfully sold a leftover Murdered: Soul Suspect key on G2A, I finally had a try.

To what extent can this business be considered decent I'm not sure - because the product I sell, US iTunes Gift Card $10 and the platform on which I'm selling are both borderline, maybe trespassing a few Terms of Service here and there, maybe not. How many can I sell or how many should I sell to make this business lucrative is also unclear to me. I'm like a child plunging into the business world with too many success stories and only to uncover the truth is not so - I have an enormous self-regard backed by none testable evidence, and an equally enormous conscience to believe in the regard's validity.

My girlfriend is now snoring on the bed we share during the night; her computer appears fully charged; the yellow light on the coffee machine shines like a veg, and I have closely the curtain willfully, forging an artificial nocturnality to be enjoyed by a mind that refuses to be disturbed for no good reason, at least not those I prefer to articulate - I have written so much about things that are ultimately moot in the sense that everything I perceive is moot and useful in the sense that everything is useful. I decided to quit and was sternly instructed by my girlfriend to cease, but I persisted, putting down thoughts rather than facts - because facts lose their relevance when it becomes one man's un-history - though thoughts might not matter at all in their first place. Both me and my girlfriend are repulsed by the notion of me needing to write. I consider such metaphorical repetition an unnecessary and bland detachment, while my girlfriend just intuitively assumes it's less than agreeable for a joyful boyfriend to hold such down-to-the-earth argument about what reality means. However, I'm still writing, for otherwise I would have nothing to tell, and out of a more foreboding conviction, no one to tell. Although it is completely plausible for Google to shut Blogger down because blogging on the internet just seems so archaic compared to Twitter and Facebook and they are better off using that money for developing auto-driving cars, I still write without ever having the intention to make a backup copy - I offer these things to Google's cloud hard drive and let God decide where they should end up.

Now I type more tentatively as she has woken up for a brief moment to snooze her phone.

Now I no longer want to type.

2/19

I have requested another removal of game from my Steam library today, the first being the Portal 2 game I ordered with the last bits of mobile phone balance, and now the censored version of Team Fortress 2 game - neither of them I really care; I rarely play them, and often when I do, I would be shocked by how little difference they actually possess. They are both cartoonish; their objectives are both killing and avoid being killed; they are both a de-realized version of a more intricate repetition I used to play - Battlefield 4. And surprisingly, for the last month, I have spent very little, if anything at all, outside of the usual necessities, beside the investments in games, which now I purchase according to chunks of titles instead of a title and collections of DLCs instead of a DLC, all for the very simple reason that the price scheme alludes the former would be more agreeable if I would eventually desire a complete experience. I have somehow willingly fallen into a sort of psychological finesse, willingly exploited by consumerism I once so deprecated. I began to cease caring about grades entirely, for a defensible reason of course, that today's employers seldom seem to care about what's in an applicant's academic profile, and therefore it appears reasonless for me to strive to be disappointed again.

In one conversation I held with my roommate Husain, he mentioned how the 3 Afghan college applicants he was once a member of went with a pact that none of them should apply for the same college, and how he was then rejected by all the dreamy American schools and how his friend got 2 full scholarships from 2 prestigious universities - the fact that he has to be ending up in Jacobs University haunts him, and maybe, in a vaguely distinguishable way, haunts me as well. I often wonder if there's real value to here - I saw defunct student government, unresponsive and sometimes unfit administrations; I also saw a lot of talented people, financially bereft, struggling to death unto realize whatever dream means to them, and the smiling German staff in the package center, and the oh-so brilliant Apetito Catering lady cashier - interactions go on even if we hardly understand each other. And my girlfriend - though frankly I have never for a millisecond thought of having one, always exerts this lightness that melts me, that with her I was dragged out of my own grandiose definition of what reality is and lose my usual urge of having to worry.

And yet all of these seems more tuned down for me than it is supposed to be for a normal person. I have a tendency to monochromate all colors into a hue whose internal difference is quantifiable. I tried to justify the case with my poor eyesight and the lack of glass. But I'm not sure yet if it is merely the abrupt increase of visibility that caused my brain to delightedly perceive a positive change.

I rarely feel truly liberated, and when I do, it seems more as if I myself am suspended than I am truly a part of that liberation. My girlfriend is changing her shoes and a second-hand German Shritte International 2 textbook that we both regretted purchasing. I may or may not wash those 3 Chinese characters off my wrist. I may or may not go to the Public Management course or Social Entrepreneurship course tomorrow. I may have a great GPA by the end of this semester. I'm secretly hopeful though, hopeful that something astoundingly different might burst in and change everything for me, or me for everything.

Oh yeah, just today, less than 5 hours ago, I spent another 15 dollars for a Humble Square Enix Bundle 2 that includes Sleeping Dog, Thief, Deux Ex, and Tomb Raider I would not play but would certainly download.

At least I'm satiated for the moment being.

2/12

The first semester here at Jacobs University has been characterized by a tinge of loose dreadfulness.

I have ceased blogging for over half a year; I've met with my girlfriend who seems a straw of hope far reached, and for sure my two roommates, one of whom left for another school, and the other about to; I've met with Alin, a Romanian hacker mostly untrimmed, sometimes manipulative, and Atabak, whose Pakistan name I can hardly pronounce - though now my inauthentic way of saying his name has been acknowledged and nodded on. And of course, a vast entourage of acquaintances.

I do also speak preliminary German, often out of etiquette to the German staff at the Appetito Catering when I feel like to, and to the German instructor Prof. Dr. Silke Cramer whose real identity eludes me, and to whom I always hold respect until one day on my way back to College Nordmetall, e.g. CNM she said hello to me and I hardly responded.

Honestly I don't know what drags me back here. This is the place where I used to think and reveal - it's sacred. Anyone, anything that's drained of creativeness, or at least an urge of feeling hopeful should be forbidden, until the creator of this place himself has descended - or in a more literal sense, not at all descended but merely smoothed out, capped away, and quelled down. The same Razer Blade, the same room, the same way of handling the power cord by inserting it through the hole on the desk, the same penis upon which my hands viciously squeezed, they are all the same seem all the same except they're not - the rubber band at the back of the Razer is now attached with super glue, the room was effectively deserted for 3 months because the room across from the corridor is where my girlfriend lives, and the penis is worn by the same female genital I privileged myself, my grandmother is gradually recovering from the stroke with a gradualness I can neither measure nor feel. She's alienating, along with my parents, my cousins, and nieces of mine who are supposed to call me uncle - their images are fading, even when during those occasional QQ Video Conferences, I always notably frown my face because the topics are bland - the usual temperament of me and my father makes us unlikely to consider any such conversation necessary.

I depleted the possibility of altering the ossification of life here, I used dustbins as foot-bathing bucket, I took kettle down to the servery and filled it with juice, I bought 126 bags of instant noodles a time from online Asian supermarkets and cook them with refrigerated vegetables; I went to Hamburg, Amsterdam and Lisbon, all of them nice cute little places of which I took a lot of photographs, most of them statically colorful, few of them especially so, yet I have never intended on sharing those photos on any website. My reluctance to take photographs disappears because from those moments my willingness to seek meaning is replaced by a procrastinating slumber to Seek It Later.

My roommate Husain, with a single "S" I just bewared earlier in the day, once confessed to me that in this university people come without other options, diversified in terms of skin color, unified in terms of indifference. People pretend to like it, working hard as a cow, organize party, use English with upper-middle class tones and vocabulary to forge a style that they do not own but aspires. He thinks it's pointless and oh I so woefully acquiesced.

I entertain people not only for their amusement but also for mine - I'm quite easily entertained and outright entertaining.

I focus on life in this moment no longer because I'm tired of thinking of too many possibilities, but because I'm afraid I can't think of any.