I've written plenty lately, but they are not the works I produced - they're my failure to produce them.
I once lamented that I spent too much time doing things that are ultimately useless, playing Planetside 2 or Battlefield 4 non-stop, and writing to quell or justify my guilt of being rebellious. Yet now I have lost interest in gaming, and only write because I feel like having a heritage. I skip classes mostly, crease applying for any internship, write 500-word essay in 20 minutes so I can have some time to look for something that interests me. I don't know how to categorize this, and I doubt such a life is even worthy of being categorized.
I was quite athletic back in high school. Every Sunday afternoon I would bring a Spalding basketball and practice shooting at the far end of the playground. I established a sort of preference of only playing basketball there, though not because I was unsociable that I want to stay away from the building cluster, but for the particular noise of a basket I make when I shoot the ball at a slimmer angle. I went there mostly at 1 PM, and people would start coming and join me from 2 PM. We would eventually have a crowd big enough for a 3-versus-3-versus-3 competitive match, taking turn for every 3 points, with a 3 pointer accounting for 2 points and the regular one 1 point. It was the same group most of the time, and I was so notorious for finishing the match with two 3 pointers that they eventually changed the rule, making a 3 pointer only 1 point. For a time I was pretty satirical about the fact. Later I shot 3 pointers less and less, and eventually stopped altogether. At the end of the first year, students were divided into two groups to ready for the College Entrance Exam. The group of people I usually played with ended up in a different class from mine. Although we still play basketball from time to time, even in the rainstorm and I always feel eager for the court after a day's class, our frequency of actually playing it decreased - it was that time when I cultivated this habit of going to school as late as possible on Sundays. I seemed to avoid the school and consequently, the basketball. They seemed to be avoiding them too. And by the time I quitted school, I had long stopped playing basketball.
Now if I recall, my entire past 4 years has a curve of decreasing enthusiasm. My tremendous speed of acquainting with things and an equally tremendous boredom afterwards make everything less glaring than they are supposed to be. My grandmother's stroke, and the subsequent bone fractures, moving to my apartment for care, reached me in a form of a flow almost incessant, yet I adapted to those news as fast as I adapt to updates on Skimmin iPhone app I reply on and check nearly every day. Bundled with instant noodles in the freezer long eaten by my mother, the six dozens of chicken meat stick I bought online, and the sixth-floor windowsill I sat on with the windows I could close but couldn't lock because of the internet cable, my presence in the past, or the former me who I consider better encapsulates myself than the present version, is looming away, beyond the horizon of my current window, which I have learned to always lock from September, to prevent the giant mosquitoes that might or might not bite from entering.
I video-chat with my family every week on Saturday at 1 PM, and I have forgotten about it almost two weeks in the row. Because when I wake up to the mornings, each of them reminds me of how distant and alien a soul I am from I was, and I could only stand as long as no one ever is interfering with my business of an aimless ambition. But my family are always the concerning type.
Mine, to the end, is a history long gone. Although I still listen to Nocturne In E Flat Major, Op. 9 No. 2 in the bathroom, the exact same piece from iTunes Radio and a Japanese porn I used to watch back home. It kept me up when I was preparing for the exams; in front of it, I have masturbated, cried, whined and sworn; my fingers moved over pencils, keyboards, phone screens, my footsteps through China, Singapore and Germany, from countries to countries, bathrooms to bathrooms, relentlessly I listened, and relentlessly I carried on.
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Varun Jotwani complained today during dinner that my jokes are getting a little repetitive. I had been known by him as a Chinese who feels too embarrassed about his nation that he shunned topics about it. And later I was dubbed as someone who's hyper-intelligent, but often chooses to appear dumb as not to intimidate people. Neither of his statements are correct. I'm usually overly critical about my nation and almost certainly not an intelligent figure, let alone an overly intelligent one. But I have always adored watching him trying to make sense, of me being too observational, politically incorrect, sensitive to different English accents and good at telling jokes that dumbfound people rather than amuse them. He bid farewell soon after like he did at noon, he has a German class at 7 PM, and work to do afterwards. I realized that, his life, at its own unique superficiality and blandness, is what I have yearned for - he's one of a particular type of people who always appear unthreatening, and therefore agreeable to get along with.
Long after my encounter with him, when I was sitting in the toilet, a buzzing sound that resembled the civil defense siren rang from the east of my location. Albeit that common sense dictates there won't be any such thing as Russian or Chinese military invasion taking place on German territory, I posted about it on our Dinner Squad Facebook group chat - it's a group formed during the winter break to cope with boredom with an occasionally expanding membership, and the name came from me, and has since been a quasi-official self-designation amongst us group members. Few had read the messages, and even fewer had replied. Varun was one of them, explaining that he just opened his window, and speculating that it might be the siren of an ambulance. And hence my most memorable episode of the day.
