Ponderously I raise my right arm towards the light and sniffed at it - it's the smell of a roasted chicken that is raw inside but overcooked on the surface. The bumpiness of my percutaneous layer signifies a minor imperfection of the automation of metabolism. I saw, through a pair of myopically astigmatic eyes, cracks and scurfs, vitiligos and spots, and the relics of my densely printed palm, mostly ridges, and occasionally veins that lurk in the shadow of my gesture of holding a hand. The artificiality of light, profoundly uniform and mild, irradiates through the half-closed curtain, and kindles a yet small spider that dares to traverse the transversal surface plagued by what appears to be a morphological glitch in the antepenultimate deck. The roar of the heater, though almost inaudible to my wonted ears, still persists at the back end of my nerve - amongst the thermal slugs, countless spider webs ligate the openings, making the noise a tad wriggling instead of a tranquil flat. It sometimes would also function as my armrest. Whenever I'm tired of navigating the decimation in a game or simply prefer the mental break that is always enshrined by a delightful anguish of my rasterized elbow. Such an imprint is never too deep as I lack flesh of a considerable thickness - it would stop at the bone, compress the meat to the extent of a foil, yet not too leafing to cause a tangible hurt. And right upon it, the cord of my Beats by Dr. Dre headphone dangles, drooping onto the ground with its standardized 3.5-millimeter connector facing upward, peering at the ceiling with an exact perpendicularity - what it is seeing on the ceiling I cannot discern, the wall coating of the latest university apartment is untainted with the smog of bongs and the smoke of weed. The only discordancy, originally a colossal mosquito splattered onto the wall by my pitiless brandish, is mysteriously gone, leaving behind a dim gray dot on the wall that might or might not be its mutilation. The remains is probably still atop the floating bookcase, however my own sanitary standard is superficial enough to allow for a principle neglect. On the platform of my desk, a spray bottle in alignment with the black kettle has the nozzle pointing at the direction of the plastic ink lines that mark the water stages with an equipotent interval, with the exception of the max level, which terminates at "1.7L" instead of 2.0L (I had previously postulated that such a reduction prevents the galloping seethe - it turned out, the efficacy is merely nominal). And it unwittingly reminds me of a white supremacist commanding the gaily starkness of a black underling. The cream contained therein which Winnie used at the beginning of her college loses its white to the yellowishness from the photochemistry of the reading lamp - its color is even more despotically dark compared to the printing paper from the German course - which reads "Abend das Konzert Hören?" on the first line with the former half of the sentence veiled by a rambling pile of COMMERZBANK booklets and a stapled collection of case study from today's Academic and Professional Skills class. The doodles on the paper are either blue or black in color, short of youthful panache yet rife with a professional indifference from having already bullshitted a lot. On the northwest of where I am sitting, is a last-year-model iPad with a cardboard roll, bereft of tissue, on its screen. The roll used to be circular but was somehow battered into an ellipse, leisurely seated while girdled by the line of my Microsoft office mouse that I use for gaming. Ritually and aslant, the cardboard roll is the veteran to be vetted for its own gloriousness. And just when all of my attention is diverted externally, my stomach sounds, with a particular type of drippiness to indicate that I am, indeed a gobbet of organics instead of a heap of mineral. Yet the vitality of it, all the writhing and twitching, bizarrely, would condescend me into the spiral of a fluorescent panic attack, indistinct, residual, but flocked.
The vesperality of night, enchanting and spacious, brews outside of the window of my immobile carriage. And the halos of lights are fainter than last time I have depicted of them. The pedestrians stroll beneath its pliant head, swift and unheeding, towards the home of their familiarity. Varied sprouted trees, the once carking, now dormant swarm, and the wooden German lodges with their respective bathrooms and a tonsured, shaven lawn, compose the concert of an impeccable stillness - by day they are vivid, by night they are equally vivid but contracted. The College Nordmetall building appears the pillar of my pursuing soul that is full of witty remarks and kittle satires and which capitulates whenever its housing demands to pee or poo - such as that, like what has happened the umpteenth of times, I would grab several pieces of toilet paper and march towards the restroom, where my arse festively emits, and where the pond festively splashes. Sitting to the front and sitting to the behind are both fruitlessly unavailing, as if the water, when I am not snooping, would move in accordance to my arse.
Girgle, girgle, the water inside the kettle is drunk. And abruptly I feel thirst. And my literariness concedes as I storm to pour myself two glasses of tap water. While drinking, I saw a dead insect climbing the wall, wielding the slender tentacles and dowsing for its desirous flee. Tugging my pants, I survey myself in the mirror, a basebred turd with no blood but ouns, no suffering but scars, and utterly exanimate - I slept for four hours the preceding night and had a class of nine hours. Fuck! Cunt! Shithead! "Sun" of a bitch! It just shouldn't be; and it just shouldn't be, thou dainty fambler!
A sordid shriek, hoarse and whisht, valorous and timid, screeches, clangs, and bawls from afar, and it blisters, blisters, and blisters while being perfectly noiseless, sober, and benign. I'm throbbed, capped out, and pushed away from a dump of anonymous, smoldering wreck which I cordially disliked yet nonetheless fervently revered. It's all ostensible and futile and ungainly and stochastic, as I sit, dumbfounded and weary, and undress to be fallaciously dethroned - for now the arrearage is amounted, and the deal has been summed. Good day!
Saturday, April 25
Friday, April 24
4/25
I put on my Nike+ Fuelband again. On my wrist it feels identical to from one year ago - the black rubber finish I chose deliberately when I first bought it on Taobao lying on the bed of my uncle's countryside shack, and the flashy LED light in the front that serves as a timer, a calorimeter and a pedometer. Every time I boot it up from the long oblivion of my lack of usage, it would show a welcome message in a pixelated white - I have never read the message in its entirety, for the screen only shows a partial text and I would often be distracted by the yellow, green and red lights shining from the top and the bottom. I wore it extensively when I bought it. Even when the weather began to cool, I would keep my short-sleeve on, so the band could always be visible to others. At that time my favorite clothes for it is a red T-shirt with random alphabetical doodles in the front, which was then used by my mom as a rag in the kitchen, for wiping clean the oil on the gas cooker every time she cooks meal for me. Yet I didn't not actually use the Fuelband - after the button click to activate, the phrases shown there are in a dazzlingly large font that reveals the desolated functionalities to any prying eyes. I took more buses with the Fuelband on. There was an afternoon, what date and day of the week it was I cannot remember, when I went downstairs, and eventually took a bus trip to the city center because I felt like wearing a Fuelband would make me more attractive to girls. With my face stern and body straight, I gazed around as if I'm an upper-class guy who has to take the bus and who would definitively not choose to if any other option was present, and occasionally pulled out my not so brand new but exquisitely maintained 64GB iPhone 5s that was sold in Hong Kong and then doubtfully resold in a semi-gray online electronic appliance store in a mainland province - it was the second iPhone 5s I bought, because the first one has a dead pixel I failed to overcome and was stolen as I had chosen the without-insurance option when sending it back to the vendor. The police promised to investigate, and did not reply, and the owner of the package delivery service branch, who had went bankrupt promptly after I sent back the phone, offered me privately, 800 RMB as compensation. And I vowed not to buy any more smartphones until I bought the iPhone 6 Plus in Germany.
The spring has made me more willing to go out. And I started playing basketball again. I played for an hour this afternoon with a Turkish foundation year student named Burk, practicing shooting, complementing of his skill, getting complemented of mine, and went back to go to the Social Entrepreneurship class.
-
Stately, I emerge from the shower room, drying myself with the towel on the chair. I was going to restart my laptop and finish the draft of today's non-journal, and non-narration. However instead I find myself standing on the scale - it was a bitterly 56 kilogram - I was once 60 kilogram back in high school, and turned around to lie about the weight. I intoned to my girlfriend, floundering in voice and gesture, that it was a bitterly 57 kilogram, and all of sudden it becomes an acceptable number.
Monday, April 20
4/20
I need to do more exercises, to laugh more, and to be not so fearful of death - I have told myself of it one year ago, and what I am supposed to do now isn't that - I should be looking at the Stats homework that is so far solely done by Bela to prepare myself for the assessed lab two days later. I planned to sit in for an entire Sunday for the assessed lab but I did not do anything, just like right now I am doing nothing. For sure, by nothing I do not mean the vacancy of thoughts and movements, even the direst and the emptiest moments of my life are filled with the firings of neurons, the beating of heart and the shivering of leg. I just stared onto the wall where my girlfriend's to-do schedule, long expired from weeks ago, written on memo pieces topped by colorful snippet to imitate the reminder app of a smartphone, is stuck, emptied the snot I picked from my nostril to the ground I vacuumed several days ago, logged into my TP-LINK router management page, tried to resolve the network outage issue and failed. I also can hear from my girlfriend's laptop the voice of Chibi Maruko Chan I have acquainted purely thanks to the frequency of it being played - although it's a dubbed Taiwanese Mandarin version that is slightly altered from what the Japanese anime maker had intended, she doesn't like the original one because it sounds alien to her, and such that it becomes emotionless and unrelatable. Also I drank all two tubes of multivitamin effervescent tablets I bought together with the first batch of female hygiene product in Marktkauf in last semester. Both she and I had thought that it is impossible for me to finish them up, because those tablets have a taste not flattering to me who's used to drinking orange juice in bulk. But I finished, miraculously, and it really showcases how much I value my own health, apart from the usual slumber of staying indoor, sleeping extremely late and more than ten hours a day. I still have other multivitamin sources, of course, as blue pills contained in the white plastic medicine bottle, from Apotheke, a small German pharmacy from which I bought vitamin pills for myself and cold medicine for my girlfriend.
I read, just now on the internet, one of my favorite author and proudly unknown, wrote in his diary that he disapproves of fantasy novels - his cousin came into his room filled with trunks of books and inquired if he has any fantasy novel. He said no. And I must confess that I read tons of fantasy novels, usually not in English since western authors, while approachable and modern, still possess a trait that seems too often to remind me of a certain revered literariness, that the act of reading is a noble business regardless of what is being read. Chinese authors, internet authors, on the other hand with their wretched taste and insipid style, attract me with a very sense of being intellectually base and emotionally simplistic. And yes, I read pirated versions of Chinese internet fantasy novels. Moreover I am a frequent patron of the pirate game site 3DMGAME, with countless dubious pictures and borderline jokes for my niddering amusement, and porn sites from which I accidentally reused a hyperlink in my clipboard for group-writing the academic essay of the course Environmental and Resource Economics. None of people in that group believes it's an inadvertent act. I'm known as a serious person who entertains others via pretense. And I'm not too eager to debunk their belief.
There is one unread in each of my three inboxes, the first one is from LinkedIn that shows Paul Ladwig has accepted my invitation; the second one is sent from Microsoft Insider Program, Gabe Aul whose email address has the word "email" hyphenated; and the last one from Turnitin that reads "You have successfully submitted the file "HW9 - Bela, Lijiao, Kaiyu" to the assignment "Homework 9" in the class "Statistical Concepts and Data Analysis 2015" on 20-Apr-2015 09:20PM. Your submission id is 531158043. Your full digital receipt can be downloaded from the download button in your class assignment list in Turnitin or from the print/download button in the document viewer." I carefully checked through all three emails, have Outlook mark them as read, and minimize the window to resume my writing. At this point I am compelled to admit, the reason of such persistence, wondered by myself every time I would think about it, is that I not only consider myself entirely normal, but also have realized it - I'm on par with the male cashier at the Apetito servery (he's one of the many cashiers politely disregarded by the lordly university students, and I'm amongst the only ones to say hi to him whenever I pass by), and the porter (clumsy, tall, and nice), the fool living in a garage near the apartment set where my grandmother used to live (the last time I went by his domicile, I was befuddled that he is still out there and alive), the wanton shop lady, and the imaginary Sichuan Restaurant Owner who I know very well under a fictional apartment building I lived in Wuxi. The only difference that sets me apart from them is the fact that I write.
-
Before I went to the shower, I had already set an expectation of not having a fresh pair of spare underpants to wear tomorrow. It turned out that in the brown carton box what had been thought of as a pair of my girlfriend's textile pants are my underpants. I was exhilarated. This is the most delightful moment of the day!
-
Today I have waken up solely for the Resource Economics class, and I have attended both of the sessions - a tremendous feat for me. I did not know why I had gone there, I did not know even after I went there - the first session was filled with jargons whose technicality is not completely necessary; the second session were the usual student presentations in which Bela and the missish German (Turkish - updated on April 26) girl talked about confusions, exactly what kind of confusion has eluded me (perhaps that is the reason they talked about it), and for which I have complied a tediously lengthy synopsis on the polycentric approach for sustainability policy making. I did not get the opportunity to actually present because the professor ended up talking about an interesting topic that involves the applicability of property rights in space. He was nice enough to turn back and question if we have understood, while pausing briefly to add, everything - I nodded and laughed viciously, looking straight into his eyes to see a theatrical amusement similar to that of mine.
After dinner I borrowed the campus card from Husain to do the laundry amassed from the past week, and went to the presentation meeting for the Public Policy and Management course on Friday morning. When I showed up in the C3 Quiet Study Area (QSA), everyone seemed suspiciously familiar to me. The group was an unfortunate blend of German and American girls whose English is so perfect that they are able to convey every single idea with a verbosity unparalleled by that of my own - though the idea itself is utterly dubious. I had to sit there for roughly an hour only to have myself dismissed from the meeting.
I then sat at the bench in front of Krupp for some period. Because most of the shutters in Krupp are closed, I was somehow struck by a usual urge to put down something onto the pages - I complained that, I came here with a mind of perfect clarity, and that clarity has been lost in me gradually for a reason yet evasive to my understanding, until I conclude that university is not a place for writing. And then I headed back to College Nordmetall, retrieved the laundry from the drier, and then took the elevator up to my room to sleep - no expounding of my nighttime stroll and without a dirge for my lost youth, only sleep. (4/21)
I read, just now on the internet, one of my favorite author and proudly unknown, wrote in his diary that he disapproves of fantasy novels - his cousin came into his room filled with trunks of books and inquired if he has any fantasy novel. He said no. And I must confess that I read tons of fantasy novels, usually not in English since western authors, while approachable and modern, still possess a trait that seems too often to remind me of a certain revered literariness, that the act of reading is a noble business regardless of what is being read. Chinese authors, internet authors, on the other hand with their wretched taste and insipid style, attract me with a very sense of being intellectually base and emotionally simplistic. And yes, I read pirated versions of Chinese internet fantasy novels. Moreover I am a frequent patron of the pirate game site 3DMGAME, with countless dubious pictures and borderline jokes for my niddering amusement, and porn sites from which I accidentally reused a hyperlink in my clipboard for group-writing the academic essay of the course Environmental and Resource Economics. None of people in that group believes it's an inadvertent act. I'm known as a serious person who entertains others via pretense. And I'm not too eager to debunk their belief.
There is one unread in each of my three inboxes, the first one is from LinkedIn that shows Paul Ladwig has accepted my invitation; the second one is sent from Microsoft Insider Program, Gabe Aul whose email address has the word "email" hyphenated; and the last one from Turnitin that reads "You have successfully submitted the file "HW9 - Bela, Lijiao, Kaiyu" to the assignment "Homework 9" in the class "Statistical Concepts and Data Analysis 2015" on 20-Apr-2015 09:20PM. Your submission id is 531158043. Your full digital receipt can be downloaded from the download button in your class assignment list in Turnitin or from the print/download button in the document viewer." I carefully checked through all three emails, have Outlook mark them as read, and minimize the window to resume my writing. At this point I am compelled to admit, the reason of such persistence, wondered by myself every time I would think about it, is that I not only consider myself entirely normal, but also have realized it - I'm on par with the male cashier at the Apetito servery (he's one of the many cashiers politely disregarded by the lordly university students, and I'm amongst the only ones to say hi to him whenever I pass by), and the porter (clumsy, tall, and nice), the fool living in a garage near the apartment set where my grandmother used to live (the last time I went by his domicile, I was befuddled that he is still out there and alive), the wanton shop lady, and the imaginary Sichuan Restaurant Owner who I know very well under a fictional apartment building I lived in Wuxi. The only difference that sets me apart from them is the fact that I write.
-
Before I went to the shower, I had already set an expectation of not having a fresh pair of spare underpants to wear tomorrow. It turned out that in the brown carton box what had been thought of as a pair of my girlfriend's textile pants are my underpants. I was exhilarated. This is the most delightful moment of the day!
-
Today I have waken up solely for the Resource Economics class, and I have attended both of the sessions - a tremendous feat for me. I did not know why I had gone there, I did not know even after I went there - the first session was filled with jargons whose technicality is not completely necessary; the second session were the usual student presentations in which Bela and the missish German (Turkish - updated on April 26) girl talked about confusions, exactly what kind of confusion has eluded me (perhaps that is the reason they talked about it), and for which I have complied a tediously lengthy synopsis on the polycentric approach for sustainability policy making. I did not get the opportunity to actually present because the professor ended up talking about an interesting topic that involves the applicability of property rights in space. He was nice enough to turn back and question if we have understood, while pausing briefly to add, everything - I nodded and laughed viciously, looking straight into his eyes to see a theatrical amusement similar to that of mine.
After dinner I borrowed the campus card from Husain to do the laundry amassed from the past week, and went to the presentation meeting for the Public Policy and Management course on Friday morning. When I showed up in the C3 Quiet Study Area (QSA), everyone seemed suspiciously familiar to me. The group was an unfortunate blend of German and American girls whose English is so perfect that they are able to convey every single idea with a verbosity unparalleled by that of my own - though the idea itself is utterly dubious. I had to sit there for roughly an hour only to have myself dismissed from the meeting.
I then sat at the bench in front of Krupp for some period. Because most of the shutters in Krupp are closed, I was somehow struck by a usual urge to put down something onto the pages - I complained that, I came here with a mind of perfect clarity, and that clarity has been lost in me gradually for a reason yet evasive to my understanding, until I conclude that university is not a place for writing. And then I headed back to College Nordmetall, retrieved the laundry from the drier, and then took the elevator up to my room to sleep - no expounding of my nighttime stroll and without a dirge for my lost youth, only sleep. (4/21)
Sunday, April 19
4/19
Now I look much better. I just washed my hair in the sink with the Nivea Classic Care shampoo, which I have only seen here in Germany. My hair has been transformed from greasy and untonsured to refreshed and upright - that brings about an image change. Although I'm the same person wearing the same USG t-shirt and the pair of jeans my father bought with less than 20 RMB back in China and of which the zip is broken (I can no longer seal it, and people keep reminding me that the flight is open, therefore I had developed a proclivity towards wearing larger tops that can cover the zip), I no longer appear the same - the clean hair entitles me to the Apple-Store-style shirt with jeans instead of a third-world country resident who wears the above-mentioned combination simply because it is inexpensive to do so. There are still acne-like bumps in my hair that I need to make an appointment to a dermatologist to figure out, but that is not visible to anyone, and hence it is entirely fine with me.
I have been thinking, ever since I woke up, and while I was watching Winnie eating in the kitchen and playing Operation Metro after she finished, should I write today? What can I write and if I do write, would it be tolerable? I had no answer to any of those questions. The trees are already putting forth new leaves, in a kind of yellow green that only pertains to spring. The leaves near the treetops are, curiously, still in a lightly brown, resembling burnt crumbs of fried chicken with its color more subdued. Tailored in the entirely blue sky, the lazing-around of the scenery contrasts greatly with what I had assumed of a university, which is connecting, studying, and sometimes having fun with friends in a decreasing self-righteousness. Also birds, mostly pigeons, would just perch on random branches, preening and flying away when it occurs to them. However, what do I have to write about it? I would be the one least qualified - I have long been unable to admire the nature profoundly, and am wholly possessed by its literal, deeming all portrayals vulgar and all metaphors supercilious.
And it pretty much leaves me with nothing to write. I won't write about nature - this is the place for lamenting my humanity and my artificiality, which is not at all dissimilar with the religious cults of an animal's head or a plant's rhizome; I won't write about myself - apart from going to the jaw specialist, the dermatologist, Dr. Schmidtmann and a lawyer who's willing to handle my case, I have depleted the possibility of iterating what's inside of me. I was, from the beginning, a man without much of a story; and I still am, albeit I wrap myself in the beautiful coatings of being a struggling soul, an aspiring college student and a dedicated writer of his own history, I offer nothing genuinely new, nothing that would challenge the norm or alter the laws of physics, not even my own deplorable trajectory of being ultimately unimportant. From the outside, I have written, already more than five times about the bathroom and the tissue towers in it, and about Husain and his departure, about Alin and Alinism, and about Winnie and her entertainment show. I don't go out of the campus most of the time because I don't know where I can go, and I don't know who else I can go with. I don't go to parties because it seems a superficial way of spending one's time. Bushra did invite me, when we were chatting with other in the waiting room at Dr. Schmidtmann's, to go to C3 and make some chai with her, but she did not send me anything on Facebook, and I was too indolent to actively solicit one, so the chai eventually doesn't happen. I obviously do not know if it would happen in the future - I still reserve the right for it to happen.
It's 6:05 PM. And I'm usually a 6:00 PM guy and I'm hungry. And I have truly nothing to write. And I'll just walk away from the laptop, pull my girlfriend from the bed, knock on the door of Husain, and go for dinner.
I have been thinking, ever since I woke up, and while I was watching Winnie eating in the kitchen and playing Operation Metro after she finished, should I write today? What can I write and if I do write, would it be tolerable? I had no answer to any of those questions. The trees are already putting forth new leaves, in a kind of yellow green that only pertains to spring. The leaves near the treetops are, curiously, still in a lightly brown, resembling burnt crumbs of fried chicken with its color more subdued. Tailored in the entirely blue sky, the lazing-around of the scenery contrasts greatly with what I had assumed of a university, which is connecting, studying, and sometimes having fun with friends in a decreasing self-righteousness. Also birds, mostly pigeons, would just perch on random branches, preening and flying away when it occurs to them. However, what do I have to write about it? I would be the one least qualified - I have long been unable to admire the nature profoundly, and am wholly possessed by its literal, deeming all portrayals vulgar and all metaphors supercilious.
And it pretty much leaves me with nothing to write. I won't write about nature - this is the place for lamenting my humanity and my artificiality, which is not at all dissimilar with the religious cults of an animal's head or a plant's rhizome; I won't write about myself - apart from going to the jaw specialist, the dermatologist, Dr. Schmidtmann and a lawyer who's willing to handle my case, I have depleted the possibility of iterating what's inside of me. I was, from the beginning, a man without much of a story; and I still am, albeit I wrap myself in the beautiful coatings of being a struggling soul, an aspiring college student and a dedicated writer of his own history, I offer nothing genuinely new, nothing that would challenge the norm or alter the laws of physics, not even my own deplorable trajectory of being ultimately unimportant. From the outside, I have written, already more than five times about the bathroom and the tissue towers in it, and about Husain and his departure, about Alin and Alinism, and about Winnie and her entertainment show. I don't go out of the campus most of the time because I don't know where I can go, and I don't know who else I can go with. I don't go to parties because it seems a superficial way of spending one's time. Bushra did invite me, when we were chatting with other in the waiting room at Dr. Schmidtmann's, to go to C3 and make some chai with her, but she did not send me anything on Facebook, and I was too indolent to actively solicit one, so the chai eventually doesn't happen. I obviously do not know if it would happen in the future - I still reserve the right for it to happen.
It's 6:05 PM. And I'm usually a 6:00 PM guy and I'm hungry. And I have truly nothing to write. And I'll just walk away from the laptop, pull my girlfriend from the bed, knock on the door of Husain, and go for dinner.
-
I just realized that I'm already more than twenty years old. Since I was born in Wuxi No. 5 Hospital near my aunt's old apartment, an innumerable lot has gone by – I have been to Wuxi No. 3 High School, eaten a fair amount of meals and excreted a slightly lesser portion of them, and what's lost has become me.
-
Me and Winnie have been constrained to a single bed from last September. Although the two of us are sufficiently Asian to fit in, sometimes it still feels a tad uncomfortable, such as that when I try to stretch my leg I would almost always fear the movement would cause her to wake up, and that when she falls asleep ahead of me, it becomes nearly impossible for me to follow – since I would envy her and demand my own body to sleep faster, which usually causes adverse consequences that are the opposite of what I expect. I ignored this situation earlier, and have chosen to sleep at the other side of the bed when I became unable to ignore it – like right now: my head is facing the east, and my feet are on the chair I moved from her bedroom – she uses it as extra space and apparently I cannot do so – the skin of my feet is so rough that whenever I stir, they would hook up with the fabric of the chair, creating a noise not particularly annoying, but nonetheless efficacious in reminding me of what a pair of rustic feet I have.
Saturday, April 18
4/18
My desk is now underused. I sit more often by the cabinet at the end of the bed. With the chair however premium and cozy, the nature of a cabinet does not allow for a spacious leg room. So in order to sit comfortably, I'd have to sit tight. However, today, I moved my laptop back onto the desk, simply because I wanted to write, and the sounds of my girlfriend's reality show and Chinese poker game somehow hindered my will. I had, tentatively, crawled to the left of where she was sitting, and told her to use the headphones - she was then mildly incensed, but quickly told me that she's going to turn off her show to make room for my writing. To me, it's a sort of understanding that I'm grateful about but couldn't completely agree to, for it relies upon an effort from me to be understood, and an effort from her to understand. As much as I love to write, and as much as I write blandly, I am, as I actually sit in front of the computer and begin staring at the blank page of my would-be conception of the belittled mind, readily willing to call if off should there be a Turnitin deadline an hour later, or a midterm or final of any sorts tomorrow. Gladly seeing that there weren't any, or there were, just not in the name of either midterm or final, I gradually and hesitantly proceed.
The yellowish light, part of the free utility that the university generously offered me, seems a bit too glaring for a mind that strives to wander. And whenever I peek at somewhere not illuminated by it, I see a bulk and opaquely exact reflection of what is visible, embellished with occasional dots of other light sources which don't look like dots because of my astigmatism - I can neither see the forest that was a part of the landscape that I appreciated during the day, nor the lanes where local Germans walked their dogs. What I can see, however, is a frame I see almost every day since I would always close the curtains before sleep, an indistinct, normative frame that resembles the landscape of a night train, perceived but not comprehended by an awakened or sleepless insomniac, as he rests his chin on the hand, on the table beside the windowsill lit up by the dim moonlight outside, except that it isn't moving. There's no sound of the wheel pressing on the rail, no replenishment of the lights passing by, only a frictionless inertia, unperturbed, unchanging, and vastly egocentric. I got up and turned off the light, the one facing downward, and left the other, facing upwards, open - because my girlfriend had always demanded that at least some lights should be on, and otherwise it spooks her. I still cannot see anything in that darkness. It has simply no weather, no content, and no space.
This side of the College Nordmetall building, and the side I preferred, since it faces the woods beyond the barbed wire that marks the boundary of what is my college, instead of south hall, or graveyard, or worse, the other part of college building, where my fellow students not only dwelled, but also are visible. And I do not like it - though there are people living on the same side of the college as I do, with their varied appliances on, leading lives of their own unique exclusivity, I remain nonchalant because I do not see them, and they do not see me, and that suits me.
The last time, and also amongst the few times that I got to walk out of the residential building during the night was three days ago, the night before Alin's birthday. I had a panic attack when I was lying on the bed, waiting to fall asleep. I was lost, or rather, not lost at all but too certain about my own conjectures that I did not expect it to come, and did not know how to cope with it. My girlfriend, wearied and on the tinge of falling asleep, woke up momentarily to read the Wikipedia entry I showed her about panic attacks, and said nothing to comfort me because she didn't know what to say and I didn't know what to listen. I went out, alone, to the bench in front of Krupp College and to the south-western end of the small-scale football field where I used to sit on and have ceased since I've got a girlfriend. I got out on slippers and jeans with the dark blue jacket I always wear, stopping at Krupp to take a sip at the Apetito juice machine - that didn't work out - there's a line of German on the machine that I don't know but means the machine has been turned off and is not available for free juice. I exited the building to the bench. Nobody was there, of course. I sat for a brief moment on the chair gazing at the football field, totally inactive as it was active during the day, the Krupp building with a lot of lights on, and the C3 building with less. I didn't see Mercator College though, it was invisible from where I sat, and in fact it has always been somewhat shady since I ever came here. The people I know who are from Mercator are scarce, and the lack of their presence makes everyone there almost ethereal to me - the dude who was helpful enough to open the door of Krupp for me several weeks ago, was he still smoking in front of the building? Probably no. Had he and will he? Probably yes. Aside from this, my knowledge is scant.
That night was supposedly in spring, already a dozen days into the Daylight Saving Time, and I have seen a lot of people with short sleeves and jeans around in the campus. But the temperature was still cold enough to thwart me from continuing to sit on the bench. On my way there I had pictured myself picturing the time when Marco and I were sitting there talking about philosophy, and when I was there alone, pretending to be homesick so people can start noticing me, but before half a minute, I had wiped my ass and moved back into the depressing but warm College Nordmetall Building. I'm still fervently youthful, however, I'm no longer deranged enough to take it as life's norm, which, is now an instructional manual on how to be unconventional, printed in serif font on the hardcover, with pages meticulously preserved and well-worn.
Today was Alin's birthday party. He meant to invite other people, but only one of them showed up. The rest complained that the college is too remote from where they are and they wouldn't bother the trip. There were birthday cakes, sliced ham, juice I brought up from the servery and tonic water on the table. And I walked to the freezer, retrieved the bowl containing yesterday's leftover food - a blend of Persian rice with Tibetan fried potato and Chinese fried celery and broccoli with chili, and reheated it in the microwave for two minutes under 360 watts and five minutes under 600 watts, and finished it up. Winnie fried some ham, but Atabak almost fled because of the smell of the pork. We already have more than enough than we can eat, and Alin still has ten kilograms of flower powder sent by his mom. He told her not to send it anymore when he was back in Romania during the spring break. And his mom just keeps sending.
This side of the College Nordmetall building, and the side I preferred, since it faces the woods beyond the barbed wire that marks the boundary of what is my college, instead of south hall, or graveyard, or worse, the other part of college building, where my fellow students not only dwelled, but also are visible. And I do not like it - though there are people living on the same side of the college as I do, with their varied appliances on, leading lives of their own unique exclusivity, I remain nonchalant because I do not see them, and they do not see me, and that suits me.
The last time, and also amongst the few times that I got to walk out of the residential building during the night was three days ago, the night before Alin's birthday. I had a panic attack when I was lying on the bed, waiting to fall asleep. I was lost, or rather, not lost at all but too certain about my own conjectures that I did not expect it to come, and did not know how to cope with it. My girlfriend, wearied and on the tinge of falling asleep, woke up momentarily to read the Wikipedia entry I showed her about panic attacks, and said nothing to comfort me because she didn't know what to say and I didn't know what to listen. I went out, alone, to the bench in front of Krupp College and to the south-western end of the small-scale football field where I used to sit on and have ceased since I've got a girlfriend. I got out on slippers and jeans with the dark blue jacket I always wear, stopping at Krupp to take a sip at the Apetito juice machine - that didn't work out - there's a line of German on the machine that I don't know but means the machine has been turned off and is not available for free juice. I exited the building to the bench. Nobody was there, of course. I sat for a brief moment on the chair gazing at the football field, totally inactive as it was active during the day, the Krupp building with a lot of lights on, and the C3 building with less. I didn't see Mercator College though, it was invisible from where I sat, and in fact it has always been somewhat shady since I ever came here. The people I know who are from Mercator are scarce, and the lack of their presence makes everyone there almost ethereal to me - the dude who was helpful enough to open the door of Krupp for me several weeks ago, was he still smoking in front of the building? Probably no. Had he and will he? Probably yes. Aside from this, my knowledge is scant.
That night was supposedly in spring, already a dozen days into the Daylight Saving Time, and I have seen a lot of people with short sleeves and jeans around in the campus. But the temperature was still cold enough to thwart me from continuing to sit on the bench. On my way there I had pictured myself picturing the time when Marco and I were sitting there talking about philosophy, and when I was there alone, pretending to be homesick so people can start noticing me, but before half a minute, I had wiped my ass and moved back into the depressing but warm College Nordmetall Building. I'm still fervently youthful, however, I'm no longer deranged enough to take it as life's norm, which, is now an instructional manual on how to be unconventional, printed in serif font on the hardcover, with pages meticulously preserved and well-worn.
Today was Alin's birthday party. He meant to invite other people, but only one of them showed up. The rest complained that the college is too remote from where they are and they wouldn't bother the trip. There were birthday cakes, sliced ham, juice I brought up from the servery and tonic water on the table. And I walked to the freezer, retrieved the bowl containing yesterday's leftover food - a blend of Persian rice with Tibetan fried potato and Chinese fried celery and broccoli with chili, and reheated it in the microwave for two minutes under 360 watts and five minutes under 600 watts, and finished it up. Winnie fried some ham, but Atabak almost fled because of the smell of the pork. We already have more than enough than we can eat, and Alin still has ten kilograms of flower powder sent by his mom. He told her not to send it anymore when he was back in Romania during the spring break. And his mom just keeps sending.
Saturday, April 11
4/11
Hey, here I am again, downloading Battlefield 4 at 9.5 MB/sec, a game I had haplessly deleted and haplessly restored, both as an attempt to bestow myself something to be hooked up with, either in the future or at the present. The moment I deleted the game, my girlfriend predicted that I'll definitely be coming back for more, either for my most anticipated Grand Theft Auto V, or to re-install the Battlefield 4 I no longer anticipate but am nonetheless accustomed to - she's probably correct either ways. And I realize that within these disciplines and indulgences, there is my constant struggle to cater to the provident and the immediate at the same time - which is, needless to say, not feasible. Yet I find myself inattentive to this danger, often ignoring, postponing, and when the time arrives, striving for a little while and then embracing whatever results that come out. If it is me one year ago, I would not tolerate this - for I thought of not studying simply because I would be always studying the minute I got into college - seen from now, such sentiment is not only juvenile, but ferociously wrong - as I am me, I know me and I have loathed studying from the very beginning of my education - I don't reject knowledge of course, in fact I am deemed a knowledgeable person by those surrounding me, I reject the way knowledge is dictated for me to learn in a forcible way.
I had a prolonged conversation with Husain in the kitchen after dinner - he, for some reason, had felt particularly bad, and incidentally my comments on his lifestyle makes him feel worse. And therefore I invited him to the kitchen where Winnie and Cathy were cooking, and told him that we were preparing something for him - which was not the case. To make him feel better, or rather, to make him feel that I'm empathetic about him, I said, ever since I came to the college, although I still write, my writings are becoming progressively more mechanical, that I don't ruminate as deeply, or branch out, or immerse in my own creation - I have simply become a bookkeeper of a life that is essentially too shallow to be documented, and have lost the single most important trait of see through this shallowness. And he replied, yes, of course, that's what university is for - it makes you mechanical, and it makes you borrow things from other people for the pretense of being an intellectual. As we both connived, when we write papers, hidden behind those delicate bookish words, are incredibly simple thoughts and the pile of formidable references is just a matter of Google-fu - by searching certain keywords that we had wanted to write ourselves, we come up with references simply because a proper academic writing mandates it. There are surely, tangible people who write the papers with sincerity, because they want to extend the human horizon, push the entire race forward, just that I've seen too many people, bleaching themselves with all the formulaic and bureaucratic words they know of, forging an artificial invincibility as an academic, and in the end just trying to get a diploma and a GPA which they can use to get a job in the mid-range income area that eternally would not involve horizon extending of any sorts - creativity stifled, mentality depressed, esteem erased, in a phrase, ready for delivery to the job market - let's applaud - we have harvested, these tiny little potatoes have grown into the standard size; they move through the Water Gun Knife without jamming the pipeline; the customers have much more of a consistent experience; yay.
The Battlefield 4 game and the Dragon's Teeth DLC have been downloaded - there are four more DLCs to go, especially the Second Assault DLC which includes my favorite map Operation Metro 2014. With all the previous rant I feel more guilt-free to engage my gaming activity, which is, after all, immediately pleasurable, and thus cogent. And I'll start for the second quiz for the Marketing course the day after tomorrow (technically today since I'm writing this piece at 1:14 AM), and then the Environmental Economics and Resource Management paper, and then the Statistical Concept and Data Analysis assessed lab, and then the Environmental Economics and Resource Management group project, and then the Public Policy and Management and Social Entrepreneurship papers. Well, looking in to the future this is what I see. And what I do, is mounting it with occasional outings to Hamburg, talks with a friend, and one hour a day in front of the computer typing things irrelevant to anything vaguely of utility.
I texted Gao today for more details about my summer job in the language teaching establishment in Shanghai. He said he'll ask the Human Resource about it. Although I do not worry that I'll miss this part-time job that lets me out-earn my brother Wang Yao, I do feel that earning 200 RMB a day, like Gao currently does, for me is unlikely, and that buying another Razer Blade with the money I earned is even more so, since one has to pay for rent and food. However I see how wonderful life could be at a different perspective, where I exist entirely out of my own morality, I'll be perennially happy.
I had a prolonged conversation with Husain in the kitchen after dinner - he, for some reason, had felt particularly bad, and incidentally my comments on his lifestyle makes him feel worse. And therefore I invited him to the kitchen where Winnie and Cathy were cooking, and told him that we were preparing something for him - which was not the case. To make him feel better, or rather, to make him feel that I'm empathetic about him, I said, ever since I came to the college, although I still write, my writings are becoming progressively more mechanical, that I don't ruminate as deeply, or branch out, or immerse in my own creation - I have simply become a bookkeeper of a life that is essentially too shallow to be documented, and have lost the single most important trait of see through this shallowness. And he replied, yes, of course, that's what university is for - it makes you mechanical, and it makes you borrow things from other people for the pretense of being an intellectual. As we both connived, when we write papers, hidden behind those delicate bookish words, are incredibly simple thoughts and the pile of formidable references is just a matter of Google-fu - by searching certain keywords that we had wanted to write ourselves, we come up with references simply because a proper academic writing mandates it. There are surely, tangible people who write the papers with sincerity, because they want to extend the human horizon, push the entire race forward, just that I've seen too many people, bleaching themselves with all the formulaic and bureaucratic words they know of, forging an artificial invincibility as an academic, and in the end just trying to get a diploma and a GPA which they can use to get a job in the mid-range income area that eternally would not involve horizon extending of any sorts - creativity stifled, mentality depressed, esteem erased, in a phrase, ready for delivery to the job market - let's applaud - we have harvested, these tiny little potatoes have grown into the standard size; they move through the Water Gun Knife without jamming the pipeline; the customers have much more of a consistent experience; yay.
The Battlefield 4 game and the Dragon's Teeth DLC have been downloaded - there are four more DLCs to go, especially the Second Assault DLC which includes my favorite map Operation Metro 2014. With all the previous rant I feel more guilt-free to engage my gaming activity, which is, after all, immediately pleasurable, and thus cogent. And I'll start for the second quiz for the Marketing course the day after tomorrow (technically today since I'm writing this piece at 1:14 AM), and then the Environmental Economics and Resource Management paper, and then the Statistical Concept and Data Analysis assessed lab, and then the Environmental Economics and Resource Management group project, and then the Public Policy and Management and Social Entrepreneurship papers. Well, looking in to the future this is what I see. And what I do, is mounting it with occasional outings to Hamburg, talks with a friend, and one hour a day in front of the computer typing things irrelevant to anything vaguely of utility.
I texted Gao today for more details about my summer job in the language teaching establishment in Shanghai. He said he'll ask the Human Resource about it. Although I do not worry that I'll miss this part-time job that lets me out-earn my brother Wang Yao, I do feel that earning 200 RMB a day, like Gao currently does, for me is unlikely, and that buying another Razer Blade with the money I earned is even more so, since one has to pay for rent and food. However I see how wonderful life could be at a different perspective, where I exist entirely out of my own morality, I'll be perennially happy.
Friday, April 10
4/10
Classical music and the sound of the boiling instant noodles don't blend really well, and it's even worse when the juvenile voice of the Japanese anime character Chibi Maruko Chan mixes in, and they are all the result of my today's relocation - instead of pursuing my usual writing business in that cozy, harmless room I moved into the kitchen, or more specifically the kitchen before the midnight, a place that always feels intellectually relaxed to me - in here I have met my girlfriend, with whom for two consecutive nights I talked with (I nailed her partly because of these kitchen conversations - although now I absolutely have no idea what was the topic or content); I also cooked myriad times of instant noodles here, first one being the Korean Shin Ramen borrowed from Cathy, and then those I bought from the online Asian supermarket myself, and later from the Asian supermarket downtown. They were also of drastically different flavors, from archaic to fresh, from spicy to non-spicy, though the noodles are the same and their secret ingredient is always monosodium glutamate coupled with disodium 5'-ribonucleotide. I do have a fierce knowledge that they are not in accord with my well-being, and my girlfriend especially so. She has, on multiple occasions, vowed to never consume any more instant noodles. However she has to give up eventually. Because apart from the routine of coming here for instant noodles, in this college, or even in this nation, things we have tasted back in China and can afford to taste here is almost entirely absent - albeit we went to Hamburg for the Sichuan restaurant Shu Du very often during the last semester, we have not done so for a long time because the restaurant is simply not as cost-effective as instant noodles.
This place is tainted with the mundaneness of life, deprived of classical music, contemplations of any sorts, and conversations that stretch beyond reality. Or, this place is not tainted with classical music, contemplations of whatsoever, and conversations that stretch beyond reality, and is fulfilled at its entirety of the richness of life. I used to agree with the first statement more often. And I agree with the latter one when I'm actually here, in the kitchen.
And now I have moved back from there when I finished drinking the left over soup from my girlfriend's hotpot-flavored noodles. I didn't intend to taste anything related to instant noodles today, and therefore I treasured the opportunity, to the extent that I microwaved it for one minute and a half just in order for it to be drunk at the right temperature. With my earphones in, I can hear the piano much more clearly, the same piano pieces I put on whenever I write about my own life, not to appreciate them for sure, just merely calm me with their repetition and the beautiful certainness within.
Today, I slept until 3 PM in the afternoon, and got up at almost 3:20 PM to go to the Social Entrepreneurship class scheduled at 3:45 PM in the D-Forge. In the cafe down in the library where the D-Forge is situated, I bought 3 cups of freshly squeezed orange juice, and knocked over one of them. I had to clean the mess up, and though, fortunately, the German cashier was nice enough to offer me another one for free. It was this period of time delayed that I actually get to engaged in a chitchat with one of my black acquaintances whose name I don't remember. It was him who told us that the class has been relocated to East Hall 5 and we walked there together. I asked him, during, if he feels ready for the Assessed Lab for the Statistical Concepts and Data Analysis course, and he said no, because he's not familiar with the coding part, to which I agreed for in our group it was the same situation.
During the class, we are assigned with a design-thinking task that mandates us to conjecture a person based on a set of photographs that he took, to identify that person's problems and to come up with potential solutions. In the solutions part, I wrote on note booklets the following suggestions, since I heard the purpose of design thinking, especially in its ideation phase, is all about brainstorming and applauding for the results: join the U.S. Army, or be a terrorist, or resort to Buddhism, or play Grand Theft Auto V. All of these suggestions are interesting enough that whenever the professor comes to our group, he points at my examples and tells us that this is the right direction to go. However, when we actually had to build a prototype, we went with the "blind date in a cruise ship" idea because we were not able to materialize any of the interesting ideas. And I have derived no fun from the making of prototypes from the materials. I realized I am maybe too subjunctive a person to know how to appreciate the practical things.
I dined with my girlfriend, my roommate Husain and Varun a little past six o'clock. I picked the fried chicken steak as the main dish, and had to stop eating after my girlfriend tells me that those steaks are covered in cheese. On the table, since I was prepared enough for the potential guilt of making Husain feel abandoned, I talked at length about the room application for next semester with Varun. While I don't think such an arrangement would really happen, I envisioned him replacing Husain as the roommate of me and my girlfriend, in a future that neither involves Husain nor involves the room I currently dwell in - I seem to already have forgotten my former dismay of letting my roommate go, and indeed, he has recently started to play Team Fortress 2 with his Iranian friends, speaking Persian. Even though he did invite me to play, and I did desire to play with him, a tedium of not playing Battlefield 4 stopped me from saying yes to him - I said I don't feel like talking too much today, and then went back to my room, playing Battlefield 4 and subsequently deleting the entire game after a hackusation and a failed votekick, because I had considered playing such a game time-squandering, and not at all because I had rejected Husain for the sake of it.
Alin has used my credit card twice to top up his World of Warcraft account, for 12.99 euro each and has yet returned the money; Atabak is trying to move to another college next semester for reasons I don't know but presume to be that we are not Muslims or Pakistanis, and hence he thinks he has less time with his real compatriots - none of us seems to take each other too seriously and none of us is totally willing to accept that fact - just that, when in an incident, or in any incident, there's a trade-off, we take each other as the traded-off and not the otherwise.
At this point, I see human interactions as gloomy intangibles - for the impossibility of possessing another body, as it is fundamentally external to that of our own, we opt to disown it when the situation is favorable us to gain a profit.
This place is tainted with the mundaneness of life, deprived of classical music, contemplations of any sorts, and conversations that stretch beyond reality. Or, this place is not tainted with classical music, contemplations of whatsoever, and conversations that stretch beyond reality, and is fulfilled at its entirety of the richness of life. I used to agree with the first statement more often. And I agree with the latter one when I'm actually here, in the kitchen.
And now I have moved back from there when I finished drinking the left over soup from my girlfriend's hotpot-flavored noodles. I didn't intend to taste anything related to instant noodles today, and therefore I treasured the opportunity, to the extent that I microwaved it for one minute and a half just in order for it to be drunk at the right temperature. With my earphones in, I can hear the piano much more clearly, the same piano pieces I put on whenever I write about my own life, not to appreciate them for sure, just merely calm me with their repetition and the beautiful certainness within.
Today, I slept until 3 PM in the afternoon, and got up at almost 3:20 PM to go to the Social Entrepreneurship class scheduled at 3:45 PM in the D-Forge. In the cafe down in the library where the D-Forge is situated, I bought 3 cups of freshly squeezed orange juice, and knocked over one of them. I had to clean the mess up, and though, fortunately, the German cashier was nice enough to offer me another one for free. It was this period of time delayed that I actually get to engaged in a chitchat with one of my black acquaintances whose name I don't remember. It was him who told us that the class has been relocated to East Hall 5 and we walked there together. I asked him, during, if he feels ready for the Assessed Lab for the Statistical Concepts and Data Analysis course, and he said no, because he's not familiar with the coding part, to which I agreed for in our group it was the same situation.
During the class, we are assigned with a design-thinking task that mandates us to conjecture a person based on a set of photographs that he took, to identify that person's problems and to come up with potential solutions. In the solutions part, I wrote on note booklets the following suggestions, since I heard the purpose of design thinking, especially in its ideation phase, is all about brainstorming and applauding for the results: join the U.S. Army, or be a terrorist, or resort to Buddhism, or play Grand Theft Auto V. All of these suggestions are interesting enough that whenever the professor comes to our group, he points at my examples and tells us that this is the right direction to go. However, when we actually had to build a prototype, we went with the "blind date in a cruise ship" idea because we were not able to materialize any of the interesting ideas. And I have derived no fun from the making of prototypes from the materials. I realized I am maybe too subjunctive a person to know how to appreciate the practical things.
I dined with my girlfriend, my roommate Husain and Varun a little past six o'clock. I picked the fried chicken steak as the main dish, and had to stop eating after my girlfriend tells me that those steaks are covered in cheese. On the table, since I was prepared enough for the potential guilt of making Husain feel abandoned, I talked at length about the room application for next semester with Varun. While I don't think such an arrangement would really happen, I envisioned him replacing Husain as the roommate of me and my girlfriend, in a future that neither involves Husain nor involves the room I currently dwell in - I seem to already have forgotten my former dismay of letting my roommate go, and indeed, he has recently started to play Team Fortress 2 with his Iranian friends, speaking Persian. Even though he did invite me to play, and I did desire to play with him, a tedium of not playing Battlefield 4 stopped me from saying yes to him - I said I don't feel like talking too much today, and then went back to my room, playing Battlefield 4 and subsequently deleting the entire game after a hackusation and a failed votekick, because I had considered playing such a game time-squandering, and not at all because I had rejected Husain for the sake of it.
Alin has used my credit card twice to top up his World of Warcraft account, for 12.99 euro each and has yet returned the money; Atabak is trying to move to another college next semester for reasons I don't know but presume to be that we are not Muslims or Pakistanis, and hence he thinks he has less time with his real compatriots - none of us seems to take each other too seriously and none of us is totally willing to accept that fact - just that, when in an incident, or in any incident, there's a trade-off, we take each other as the traded-off and not the otherwise.
At this point, I see human interactions as gloomy intangibles - for the impossibility of possessing another body, as it is fundamentally external to that of our own, we opt to disown it when the situation is favorable us to gain a profit.
-
Never do I feel more ready to write than when it is not suitable to do so. It's now 3:50 PM. And after a series of things I have committed, mysteriously my girlfriend is still not awakened. Though I felt that I need to sleep and indeed I should, something is still preventing me from doing it. Seemingly there's no reason, since the game I've been anticipating comes earlier if I sleep more, and that also the quizzes and midterms end sooner. I'm still reluctantly awake. I once thought that everyday when one goes into sleep, it is for him, essentially a partial death, and by waking up in the morning, what one embraces is not waking up in a literal sense as if to get out of a 15-minute nap, but a partial reincarnation that takes on a slightly altered but nevertheless distinct personality that is not the same from the previous day. However, according to science, sleep deprivation would not only cost me the personality, but also the vehicle upon which it relies to substantiate - I might actually die from it. And that's why now, I would turn off the screen, put the phone on top of the cabinet, and sleep.
Thursday, April 9
4/9
Not having written in days, I resumed tonight. Although, as usual I offer nothing dissimilar to what I have written previously, a coarse encapsulation of my colorless and slothful life.
My cold from days ago is recovering gradually. The symptoms had first exacerbated and then alleviated, like now - I don't feel anything special except for a slight itchiness down the throat that mysteriously makes my voice sound sexier - according to Varun, now I sound like a folk singer. I take pride in such a fact, and indeed become visibly more talkative during dinner - we, or more precisely, I, have dined on the table at the far end, outside of the cafeteria, for the first time since the months after orientation week. We said various interesting things which are only interesting contextually - they are only fun in this particular time period when everybody has a desire to be entertained, and among a particular group of people, Dinner Squad and Alee, to whom I said some fabricated Urdu language that actually translates to "fart". The only lackluster bit is that my girlfriend Winnie didn't show up. She got infected by me and is currently on the symptom-exacerbation stage of her cold. She did pass by me, on her way to the Water class which she takes because it's purportedly easy. She saw me, laughing wildly with my friends, and I didn't see her. For her dinner, I brought her two slices of chicken burger meat, without bread due to my own personal preference, boiled potatoes, which she didn't at all touch, and sweet potato fries, which she has finished eating, contained in a small saucer. And I have been playing Battlefield 4 ever since I came back.
Yesterday evening, I made a Facebook group called "Schmidtmann Squad", of which I, Husain, Atabak and Varun are members. It came into existence primarily because I thought I need a doctor to address all the deteriorated conditions that arise from my sub-par lifestyle, and Husain assumes and fears that his heart is having a problem, and Atabak and Varun missed their, respectively, German A1.2 quiz and General Logistics II midterm, and they need a doctor's note, which Dr. Schmidtmann pre-signs and hands out to students on demand. It's a wonderfully tacit collusion between us university students and Schmidtmann in that we get to skip anything we want, and he gets to have more patient records. Or I'm not entirely sure. It might also be that the old-enough doctor is a kind-enough man to be willing to temporarily shelter us from the troubles of the academia. And I sent via group chat a message to tell Husain to wake me up in the morning so we can got to the doctor's together. Husain didn't go because those symptoms are mild and disappear in the morning, and I was just too lazy to crawl out of my bed. The other two successfully obtained their medical excuses, albeit the fact that the real patients didn't go.
After a few hours, Rai and Varun came by knocking. Then Husain has gone down for lunch and I didn't answer the door. For I, factually, don't want to help Rai with his academic probation - I'm unwilling to deceit the professor into thinking that he has actually contributed to our group presentation, simply because he failed all the courses he's taken last semester and Society and Economy is the only course whose professor is willing to change the grade for him. Varun almost had an argument with me because I didn't open the door. And Jacob thought the same like I do and didn't go.
Having written thus long, I noticed that I fill up space with structurally insignificant things like names. And indeed there are a lot of names here, all of which I'm acquainted with and genuinely felt. I also realized, as a disturbing epiphany of an eventual riddance, however, that one of the names what appear frequently now is going to be less so into the future, probably after the day when I take the flight back to China - Husain, third-year GEM student, is graduating at the end of this semester. And as his graduation day approaches, his departure feels more irreversibly looming. When I talked to him, I can sense behind his usually sense of Husain-style humor, a kind of wane, and a kind of tiredness of having dealt with us, and having to not be able to deal with us in the future. And instead of accepting my proposal of continuing to live with us in the spare room from me and Winnie, he decides to live in Oldenburg, a nearby city, with his old friends that he had known during his time in Iran. I guess he must leave because it is simply too dreadful an experience for him to go through all the past four years by himself, and that such dreadfulness, as is testified by his decision to live in Oldenburg, outweighs whatever the so-called friendship, the so-called Dinner-Squad family style can offer. Indeed, even to me, when I'm a young, immature first year student effectively shielded from the reality of settling in the society, sometimes feel friendships are shallow, not because any of the friends involved doesn't want them to endure, it's simply that grand reality is too empowered that we have to envisage it to be able to survive, and ultimately, to move on.
My cold from days ago is recovering gradually. The symptoms had first exacerbated and then alleviated, like now - I don't feel anything special except for a slight itchiness down the throat that mysteriously makes my voice sound sexier - according to Varun, now I sound like a folk singer. I take pride in such a fact, and indeed become visibly more talkative during dinner - we, or more precisely, I, have dined on the table at the far end, outside of the cafeteria, for the first time since the months after orientation week. We said various interesting things which are only interesting contextually - they are only fun in this particular time period when everybody has a desire to be entertained, and among a particular group of people, Dinner Squad and Alee, to whom I said some fabricated Urdu language that actually translates to "fart". The only lackluster bit is that my girlfriend Winnie didn't show up. She got infected by me and is currently on the symptom-exacerbation stage of her cold. She did pass by me, on her way to the Water class which she takes because it's purportedly easy. She saw me, laughing wildly with my friends, and I didn't see her. For her dinner, I brought her two slices of chicken burger meat, without bread due to my own personal preference, boiled potatoes, which she didn't at all touch, and sweet potato fries, which she has finished eating, contained in a small saucer. And I have been playing Battlefield 4 ever since I came back.
Yesterday evening, I made a Facebook group called "Schmidtmann Squad", of which I, Husain, Atabak and Varun are members. It came into existence primarily because I thought I need a doctor to address all the deteriorated conditions that arise from my sub-par lifestyle, and Husain assumes and fears that his heart is having a problem, and Atabak and Varun missed their, respectively, German A1.2 quiz and General Logistics II midterm, and they need a doctor's note, which Dr. Schmidtmann pre-signs and hands out to students on demand. It's a wonderfully tacit collusion between us university students and Schmidtmann in that we get to skip anything we want, and he gets to have more patient records. Or I'm not entirely sure. It might also be that the old-enough doctor is a kind-enough man to be willing to temporarily shelter us from the troubles of the academia. And I sent via group chat a message to tell Husain to wake me up in the morning so we can got to the doctor's together. Husain didn't go because those symptoms are mild and disappear in the morning, and I was just too lazy to crawl out of my bed. The other two successfully obtained their medical excuses, albeit the fact that the real patients didn't go.
After a few hours, Rai and Varun came by knocking. Then Husain has gone down for lunch and I didn't answer the door. For I, factually, don't want to help Rai with his academic probation - I'm unwilling to deceit the professor into thinking that he has actually contributed to our group presentation, simply because he failed all the courses he's taken last semester and Society and Economy is the only course whose professor is willing to change the grade for him. Varun almost had an argument with me because I didn't open the door. And Jacob thought the same like I do and didn't go.
Having written thus long, I noticed that I fill up space with structurally insignificant things like names. And indeed there are a lot of names here, all of which I'm acquainted with and genuinely felt. I also realized, as a disturbing epiphany of an eventual riddance, however, that one of the names what appear frequently now is going to be less so into the future, probably after the day when I take the flight back to China - Husain, third-year GEM student, is graduating at the end of this semester. And as his graduation day approaches, his departure feels more irreversibly looming. When I talked to him, I can sense behind his usually sense of Husain-style humor, a kind of wane, and a kind of tiredness of having dealt with us, and having to not be able to deal with us in the future. And instead of accepting my proposal of continuing to live with us in the spare room from me and Winnie, he decides to live in Oldenburg, a nearby city, with his old friends that he had known during his time in Iran. I guess he must leave because it is simply too dreadful an experience for him to go through all the past four years by himself, and that such dreadfulness, as is testified by his decision to live in Oldenburg, outweighs whatever the so-called friendship, the so-called Dinner-Squad family style can offer. Indeed, even to me, when I'm a young, immature first year student effectively shielded from the reality of settling in the society, sometimes feel friendships are shallow, not because any of the friends involved doesn't want them to endure, it's simply that grand reality is too empowered that we have to envisage it to be able to survive, and ultimately, to move on.
Monday, April 6
4/6
In our bathroom there is a tissue tower on the platform behind the toilet - it is either the fourth or the fifth tissue towel built on that very location. It all started from last semester. In our university, we don't have to pay for toiletries ourselves. The university would replenish them every week by placing tissue rolls on top of the freezer in the kitchen, and people usually take with them no more than five rolls at a time. I was proudly one of them until it felt too cumbersome for me to have to go to the kitchen every week, or sometimes even worse, as toiletries are not something I always pay attention to, I would have to improvise when at the end of a restroom session, on the gray cardboard roll there's no tissue remaining. So I began to fetch as many rolls as possible from the kitchen. For the first time I did it, I took 25 rolls, separated into batches and carried by hand, to the bathroom, and then lined them up vertically until they touch the ceiling and I have to start another pile to the left. It was a rather dull way of placing them. And a week later, when I returned from Lisbon, the paper rolls have been arranged into the shape of a pyramid - not overly creative either, but new to me. I wondered for days, declaring with Husain that with this much tissue, we will never run out of toilet papers. Then I still lived in my girlfriend's room, and had just started to know him by playing games like Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2 with him. Yet the pile ran out before the end of spring break and neither of us can believe this fact - I have been programmed in such a way that the default is an infinite amount of toilet papers, and Husain only went to the kitchen when he sees that there's no paper left and usually only brought one roll at a time. I have also moved back into my room. Hence later, more than frequently I had to ask my girlfriend through both bathroom and bedroom door for extra toilet papers. It's embarrassing enough that while sitting I vowed I would bring toilet papers later. Yet after I finished I always went straight back to my bedroom. It wasn't until one random day when I was cooking instant noodles in the kitchen that I saw the green laundry basket and the mountain of tissue rolls above the freezer that I thought of bringing all of them back. It was 32 rolls this time, and there are still plenty of them in the bathroom, in the form of a mosque. I built a mosque the moment I brought those papers back. Although Husain changed it to a more modernist architectural style, it wasn't structurally stable enough to permit the piecemeal retrieval of individual rolls, as is evidenced when once during the midnight, I tried to take one out and the entire tower of more than 20 rolls collapsed. I was conscious enough to prevent them from falling into the pond of toilet bowl, but didn't manage to safeguard the integrity of the entire upper half. Husain then later changed the towers to another mosque and place the rolls in such a way that the structure is always stable to take rolls from the top and the aesthetics not glaringly disgraceful. Husain and I didn't talk about these recent amendments. Because we haven’t talked to each other properly for the entire spring break, except for those times during the dinner when I still knock on his door and he knocks on my door, and we went down together to engage in some chitchat with either insipid or recycled joke.
Today is the sixth day into April, and also the sixth day into the two-month period during which my roommate is still staying on campus. The paper towel surely will not run out on the exact day of his departure, but must be sufficiently close to it to beckon its own end. And I'll will be leaving him before he leaves me. The Lufthansa flight I booked back to China is after dinner on June 2, and he's graduation day is a dozen days later. Both of these farewells are bid permanently to the each of us, in the sense not that we are not going to meet up in the future, but that we probably are, just not in this room on the third floor (fourth floor according to elevator button) in the east side of the College Nordmetall Building, not in the binding acknowledgement that we are roommates, and not in the realization that we can, legitimately ask each other to go down to servery and dine together. He's the most laid-out Afghan guy I have ever met, though I have only seen one Afghan in my life; and I'm the most laid-out Chinese guy he has ever met, although because we Chinese tend to crowd and flood everywhere, he has seen myriad of us already. We were supposed to be good friends, supporting each other in life because we both study Global Economics and Management, and we both find each other agreeable and have both betrayed secrets and sufferings of our own respective lives. However, destiny has already played out so that I'm a freshie first-year student who just entered, and he's a callous third-year who's about to go. And I'm born and raised in a culture that instructs me to accept such baloney.
Starting from tomorrow, Grand Theft Auto V is preloading on Steam - during the winter break of the first tissue tower, I went to Lisbon, Portugal and lent my laptop for him to play some games - he has played a lot of them, and I have said to him that next time when there's cool games, I'll be lending my laptop to him another time. His laptop is four years ago and there are indeed games that I'd like him to play - the uncensored version of Wolfenstein: New Order, L.A. Noire, Max Payne 3, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and now Grand Theft Auto V. However, there's no more winter breaks for him at Jacobs University. And it's entirely reasonable for him, a 25-year-old college graduate, to refrain from gaming in the future. Therefore when he said several days ago, that he convinced two of his friends to play Team Fortress 2 with him, and that he still finds the game quite enjoyable, I decided, although I don't particularly like Team Fortress 2, I'd still play with him in the future if there's such opportunity, partly for fun, partly for the reminiscence of having shouted through the door for in-game communication.
Today is the sixth day into April, and also the sixth day into the two-month period during which my roommate is still staying on campus. The paper towel surely will not run out on the exact day of his departure, but must be sufficiently close to it to beckon its own end. And I'll will be leaving him before he leaves me. The Lufthansa flight I booked back to China is after dinner on June 2, and he's graduation day is a dozen days later. Both of these farewells are bid permanently to the each of us, in the sense not that we are not going to meet up in the future, but that we probably are, just not in this room on the third floor (fourth floor according to elevator button) in the east side of the College Nordmetall Building, not in the binding acknowledgement that we are roommates, and not in the realization that we can, legitimately ask each other to go down to servery and dine together. He's the most laid-out Afghan guy I have ever met, though I have only seen one Afghan in my life; and I'm the most laid-out Chinese guy he has ever met, although because we Chinese tend to crowd and flood everywhere, he has seen myriad of us already. We were supposed to be good friends, supporting each other in life because we both study Global Economics and Management, and we both find each other agreeable and have both betrayed secrets and sufferings of our own respective lives. However, destiny has already played out so that I'm a freshie first-year student who just entered, and he's a callous third-year who's about to go. And I'm born and raised in a culture that instructs me to accept such baloney.
Starting from tomorrow, Grand Theft Auto V is preloading on Steam - during the winter break of the first tissue tower, I went to Lisbon, Portugal and lent my laptop for him to play some games - he has played a lot of them, and I have said to him that next time when there's cool games, I'll be lending my laptop to him another time. His laptop is four years ago and there are indeed games that I'd like him to play - the uncensored version of Wolfenstein: New Order, L.A. Noire, Max Payne 3, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and now Grand Theft Auto V. However, there's no more winter breaks for him at Jacobs University. And it's entirely reasonable for him, a 25-year-old college graduate, to refrain from gaming in the future. Therefore when he said several days ago, that he convinced two of his friends to play Team Fortress 2 with him, and that he still finds the game quite enjoyable, I decided, although I don't particularly like Team Fortress 2, I'd still play with him in the future if there's such opportunity, partly for fun, partly for the reminiscence of having shouted through the door for in-game communication.
Sunday, April 5
4/5
I have caught a cold today. The symptoms have started since yesterday when there was a sore spot at the back of my throat, jamming the movement of all my soft tissues around the nasopharynx. Every time I felt this way, I would pour myself a glass of multivitamin tablet and hope to get well just with that. While the concussive ringing in the ears and the edema at the back of my eyes make every sound and visual swirling and perplexing, the isolation of me from the immediate surroundings is also more striking since I know everyone I have met with today, free of ail in their body, perceive the world in a way I usually perceive. And it somehow troubles me - though I tend to claim myself an outlier from the rest of them, I rely on their attention and empathy to legitimize such a claim. And now I'm just here, obstinate, weak, and peerless.
When I woke up at approximately 1:30 PM today, I went to the kitchen to cook some ramen with my girlfriend, two bags of Master Kong instant noodles of, respectively, roasted beef flavor for me and hot pot flavor for me girlfriend, she told me that I don't look amicable unless I'm asleep. And indeed I can testify I arbitrarily prevent myself from appearing amicable when I'm more lucid and in sleep, I'm just no longer able to achieve it. As a matter of fact, the person with whom I smiled, joked, and hugged most is unarguably her - like Bach's Air that's now being played in my headphone on a random YouTube playlist, my love to her is something I rejoice and repent at the same time. But the ramen did not taste well. I put in the usual dosage of black pepper and chili powder with some Singaporean sesame oil, all of which are a bit excessive for me at my current state. I sat by the window and she sat at the opposite corner of the table in which she usually sit. The sun shines today in a reserved way. It makes neither the room nor the grass field outside particularly bright, yet I'm unable to stare at it. I fancied, I have stayed indoor too long that I began to become photophobic. And my back, covered in the thickest plaid shirt I have that was once worn extensively by my girlfriend in the winter, mildly began to sweat to the combination of sun and the hot noodle soup. Therefore I cooled the pot with cold tap water in another, larger black pot, and finished eating swiftly. She was still eating by the time I had finished. And she kept on eating after I told her to bring the noodles back to the room because I'd like to explore fun-deriving options on my phone and laptop. She saw through me and finished on spot.
Towards the end, a Mexican girl who lives to the right of where I live showed up in the kitchen. My girlfriend said hello to her. And I said nothing. Since the end of orientation week, I have greeted her less and less, eventually stopped greeting her and forgot her name. She has found a boyfriend who once lent me a disk drive to help me reinstall the operating system. She is leading a new, more suitably customized life of hers instead of what is was during the orientation week, when we hardly knew anyone and socialize solely because we need a cover-up for our void. Of course, neither of us can say that the void has been filled. At least according to me, I merely have accepted it and cared less. As we headed back to my room. My girlfriend said bye to her. And she replied with, if I have heard correctly, "Hey there."
Interestingly, as I write my cold feel much more subsided. If previously I'm inside a loop that I go over every day, then now I'm outside of it to shed everything a more positive, though not necessarily optimistic light. My girlfriend is watching instruction video on academic writing. And because I have said yesterday that I will start study from today, I plan to go through the slides for the Marketing course which I had missed since the first quiz, and for the second quiz of German A1.2 two days after spring break's end, later in the evening.
-
Alin has come back from Romania with a pony tail, a style change that is not particularly bad but nevertheless unexpected. There was not any incongruity with him, but it takes time for me to really adapt to it, just like I did during elementary school with Shi Yi, who didn't wear glasses when I first met him then began to, and I felt unnatural. And whenever later he took his glasses off, I felt unnatural as well. I am an animal of habit. Alin didn't mention anything about my Twitter handle. Instead, he took a package of pork ramen from my girlfriend and ate it in the kitchen with my roommate Husain. My girlfriend was at first disgruntled, but was soon quelled as she realized it was just a bag of noodles.
I did study a bit after dinner. As I was playing Battlefield 4 game, my girlfriend would test me for names of different body parts with their articles in German. Often failing to recall neither the body part nor the article, I still learned something from it - there's only two body parts with the article "die", those are hand and nose. And I kept playing the game until I was disconnected from server - the internet in our university, though fast, often presents connectivity problems that only hinder the gaming experience. I'd agree that this may be a deliberate act from the university, and applaud for its ingenuity.
Dolma and Kolchak sent me and my girlfriends Easter gifts with edible chocolates, sweets, cookies, and inedible green or light brown plastic grass in them. I have finished eating all the chocolates and sweets. Although the gifts don't taste particularly good, and I think there's certain cute clumsiness in the gift exchanging process, I shall thank them for their good will, for I have forgotten to thank them when I received the gifts in person. I also got from them the disk driver with movie The City of Life and Death in it that I gave them as a kill-time yesterday evening during the hot pot. It's a pity that they didn't comment on the movie, and that led me to question whether they have watched it, in spite of the fact that I myself have never watched the movie.
When I woke up at approximately 1:30 PM today, I went to the kitchen to cook some ramen with my girlfriend, two bags of Master Kong instant noodles of, respectively, roasted beef flavor for me and hot pot flavor for me girlfriend, she told me that I don't look amicable unless I'm asleep. And indeed I can testify I arbitrarily prevent myself from appearing amicable when I'm more lucid and in sleep, I'm just no longer able to achieve it. As a matter of fact, the person with whom I smiled, joked, and hugged most is unarguably her - like Bach's Air that's now being played in my headphone on a random YouTube playlist, my love to her is something I rejoice and repent at the same time. But the ramen did not taste well. I put in the usual dosage of black pepper and chili powder with some Singaporean sesame oil, all of which are a bit excessive for me at my current state. I sat by the window and she sat at the opposite corner of the table in which she usually sit. The sun shines today in a reserved way. It makes neither the room nor the grass field outside particularly bright, yet I'm unable to stare at it. I fancied, I have stayed indoor too long that I began to become photophobic. And my back, covered in the thickest plaid shirt I have that was once worn extensively by my girlfriend in the winter, mildly began to sweat to the combination of sun and the hot noodle soup. Therefore I cooled the pot with cold tap water in another, larger black pot, and finished eating swiftly. She was still eating by the time I had finished. And she kept on eating after I told her to bring the noodles back to the room because I'd like to explore fun-deriving options on my phone and laptop. She saw through me and finished on spot.
Towards the end, a Mexican girl who lives to the right of where I live showed up in the kitchen. My girlfriend said hello to her. And I said nothing. Since the end of orientation week, I have greeted her less and less, eventually stopped greeting her and forgot her name. She has found a boyfriend who once lent me a disk drive to help me reinstall the operating system. She is leading a new, more suitably customized life of hers instead of what is was during the orientation week, when we hardly knew anyone and socialize solely because we need a cover-up for our void. Of course, neither of us can say that the void has been filled. At least according to me, I merely have accepted it and cared less. As we headed back to my room. My girlfriend said bye to her. And she replied with, if I have heard correctly, "Hey there."
Interestingly, as I write my cold feel much more subsided. If previously I'm inside a loop that I go over every day, then now I'm outside of it to shed everything a more positive, though not necessarily optimistic light. My girlfriend is watching instruction video on academic writing. And because I have said yesterday that I will start study from today, I plan to go through the slides for the Marketing course which I had missed since the first quiz, and for the second quiz of German A1.2 two days after spring break's end, later in the evening.
-
Alin has come back from Romania with a pony tail, a style change that is not particularly bad but nevertheless unexpected. There was not any incongruity with him, but it takes time for me to really adapt to it, just like I did during elementary school with Shi Yi, who didn't wear glasses when I first met him then began to, and I felt unnatural. And whenever later he took his glasses off, I felt unnatural as well. I am an animal of habit. Alin didn't mention anything about my Twitter handle. Instead, he took a package of pork ramen from my girlfriend and ate it in the kitchen with my roommate Husain. My girlfriend was at first disgruntled, but was soon quelled as she realized it was just a bag of noodles.
I did study a bit after dinner. As I was playing Battlefield 4 game, my girlfriend would test me for names of different body parts with their articles in German. Often failing to recall neither the body part nor the article, I still learned something from it - there's only two body parts with the article "die", those are hand and nose. And I kept playing the game until I was disconnected from server - the internet in our university, though fast, often presents connectivity problems that only hinder the gaming experience. I'd agree that this may be a deliberate act from the university, and applaud for its ingenuity.
Dolma and Kolchak sent me and my girlfriends Easter gifts with edible chocolates, sweets, cookies, and inedible green or light brown plastic grass in them. I have finished eating all the chocolates and sweets. Although the gifts don't taste particularly good, and I think there's certain cute clumsiness in the gift exchanging process, I shall thank them for their good will, for I have forgotten to thank them when I received the gifts in person. I also got from them the disk driver with movie The City of Life and Death in it that I gave them as a kill-time yesterday evening during the hot pot. It's a pity that they didn't comment on the movie, and that led me to question whether they have watched it, in spite of the fact that I myself have never watched the movie.
Saturday, April 4
4/4
This week's video chat with family feels somewhat different because I decided to go back to China. My mother and aunt have welcomed it. My father doesn't think it's a good idea, saying that because of my returning, he's not able to work again, and that the new daily salary I will receive, 200 RMB by teaching English at the language instruction school, is merely a casual amount he can earn by working in an apparel factory. Of course, I'm aware of the fact that my failure to obtain either a campus job or an internship has disappointed him such that he doesn't consider it worthwhile for me to receive a university education if I were to teach English in the future. I was incensed, explaining that working on minimum wage won't do as much good as he thinks - my father belongs to a generation of people who are aware of the western prosperity and are educated not to accept this fact - and those subjective denials are enhancing his objective perception of what a western country is. He continued to laugh at the jokes I willingly told, so did my mom, aunt, and grandmother. And when my father then inquired if I have made contact with my Nanjing sister who had helped me with the visa application fee of 8000 euro, I lied to him. I have neither sent a text message nor emailed her. Because I have always failed to comprehend why she decided to help me in the first place and then became reluctant to acknowledge the ambiguity inherent in such help. I now have a clear thought on what I should do - earning money when I graduate (or fail to graduate) from here, paying back her help with a certain amount of interest, and involving myself no longer in this sugar-coated, insidious web of relationships. My mother excused me for being innocent, and my aunt told me that one has to learn to become a human being before anything else. I thought, if, the meaning of a human being is to become saponaceous, even to people who I consider friends and relatives, I'd rather retain my characteristics of an unsophisticated kid. For in a world that champions fame, success, and ability to earn a superior-than-average life, I would champion my own obscurity, failure, and a monetary disability.
I am feeling hungry now. I have eaten nothing since I woke up in the afternoon. Tenzin from the Tibetan Exile Government in India just messaged me for hot pot I had promised him days ago. But I did not prepare anything, nor are there any vegetable down in the servery, due to a logic that I cannot understand - it's spring break, and they have to remove all the decorations. I said another time, and he's got some vegetables in his fridge, broccoli, paprika, and tomato. Those weren't full-fledged preparations, but with some orange juice mixed with sausage and canned sausage I'll get from the servery, reasonably enough for me. And hence we are having hot pot tonight. Me and my girlfriend, both Chinese who are said to have invaded Tibet decades ago, are having hot pot with a Tibetan, hopefully three Tibetans if Dolma and Kolchak whose name I'm still clueless to spell. I'm here for university education. This is the best education one can hope for.
The hot pot is taking place at 6:30 PM, and there's nine minutes till the servery is open. I'm listening to Chopin's Spring Waltz following Chopin's Prelude in E Minor, and I'll be going down for sausages soon. Those sausages are not delicious. The seasoning soup in which they came from even has an unpleasant smell that I have to wash the sausages before I boil them. But somehow I enjoy the home-made hot pot here more than I did back home.
Now I'm going down to the servery.
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Tenzin is the captain of the Asian football team in Jacobs University. He also comes from Tibet and posts pictures of Chinese military police beating Tibetan people. From those picture only one shows the riot police hitting a monk dressed in red with a tree trunk, and the others are just arrests. I don't understand why the Chinese government decided to tighten their control of Tibet and then claim it an autonomous region, just like I don't know why the Tibetan people never accept the fact that they are a part of China, which means they play by Chinese rules. Nearly all westerners I know thought Tibet is still an independent nation floundering under the iron fist of my government, and nearly all Chinese I know didn't at all know there's any problem in that region, including my girlfriend who lives in a major province that borders Tibet. There are bound to be some problems, which the previous generation hopelessly failed to solve, and on which the current generation is, like any affair of the 21st century, either unknowing or divided. I sent the last package of hot pot ingredient to Tenzin though. He's a third-year student electrical engineering student about to graduate, and I'm a first-year economics student yet to be worn. In no way our route seems to intersect. And all of sudden I begin to envy him. I am not him and will never be. He's not me and will never be. And his life, from my point of view, in every way as wonderful as mine and even superior, represent an impossibility for me to trespass what is me. For every trespass, however genuine, is merely an imitation.
And later I played Battlefield 4 for slightly more than an hour on Operation Metro 2014, a map I choose most and have always chosen since six days ago. In a round I killed 110 Russians, died 28 times, did 138 revives, and earned a total score of 82410 - a whopping 1648 per minute. I'm one of those who are busy on the outside of the soul, externalizing convictions to convince myself that they are reality.
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It's already 1:38 AM in the morning, and my girlfriend is still watching an American reality show. This is rather rare of her since it is she who usually urges me to sleep early. There must be something attractive to her - likely the American accent people in the show have. She adores the hardcore American-style prosperity - skyscrapers, motorways and cars everywhere. Curiously, even I sometimes have positive association of the names of several US states - for example, Virginia for tranquility, and California for tech-savviness. After all, the United States is where I had previously wanted to go for university. Though it had denied me and subsequently I had denied it, I, as well, am deeply entrenched in the impressions of my own creation - they now have become a concave mirror of what I did, and a convex mirror of what I aspired.
I am feeling hungry now. I have eaten nothing since I woke up in the afternoon. Tenzin from the Tibetan Exile Government in India just messaged me for hot pot I had promised him days ago. But I did not prepare anything, nor are there any vegetable down in the servery, due to a logic that I cannot understand - it's spring break, and they have to remove all the decorations. I said another time, and he's got some vegetables in his fridge, broccoli, paprika, and tomato. Those weren't full-fledged preparations, but with some orange juice mixed with sausage and canned sausage I'll get from the servery, reasonably enough for me. And hence we are having hot pot tonight. Me and my girlfriend, both Chinese who are said to have invaded Tibet decades ago, are having hot pot with a Tibetan, hopefully three Tibetans if Dolma and Kolchak whose name I'm still clueless to spell. I'm here for university education. This is the best education one can hope for.
The hot pot is taking place at 6:30 PM, and there's nine minutes till the servery is open. I'm listening to Chopin's Spring Waltz following Chopin's Prelude in E Minor, and I'll be going down for sausages soon. Those sausages are not delicious. The seasoning soup in which they came from even has an unpleasant smell that I have to wash the sausages before I boil them. But somehow I enjoy the home-made hot pot here more than I did back home.
Now I'm going down to the servery.
-
Tenzin is the captain of the Asian football team in Jacobs University. He also comes from Tibet and posts pictures of Chinese military police beating Tibetan people. From those picture only one shows the riot police hitting a monk dressed in red with a tree trunk, and the others are just arrests. I don't understand why the Chinese government decided to tighten their control of Tibet and then claim it an autonomous region, just like I don't know why the Tibetan people never accept the fact that they are a part of China, which means they play by Chinese rules. Nearly all westerners I know thought Tibet is still an independent nation floundering under the iron fist of my government, and nearly all Chinese I know didn't at all know there's any problem in that region, including my girlfriend who lives in a major province that borders Tibet. There are bound to be some problems, which the previous generation hopelessly failed to solve, and on which the current generation is, like any affair of the 21st century, either unknowing or divided. I sent the last package of hot pot ingredient to Tenzin though. He's a third-year student electrical engineering student about to graduate, and I'm a first-year economics student yet to be worn. In no way our route seems to intersect. And all of sudden I begin to envy him. I am not him and will never be. He's not me and will never be. And his life, from my point of view, in every way as wonderful as mine and even superior, represent an impossibility for me to trespass what is me. For every trespass, however genuine, is merely an imitation.
And later I played Battlefield 4 for slightly more than an hour on Operation Metro 2014, a map I choose most and have always chosen since six days ago. In a round I killed 110 Russians, died 28 times, did 138 revives, and earned a total score of 82410 - a whopping 1648 per minute. I'm one of those who are busy on the outside of the soul, externalizing convictions to convince myself that they are reality.
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It's already 1:38 AM in the morning, and my girlfriend is still watching an American reality show. This is rather rare of her since it is she who usually urges me to sleep early. There must be something attractive to her - likely the American accent people in the show have. She adores the hardcore American-style prosperity - skyscrapers, motorways and cars everywhere. Curiously, even I sometimes have positive association of the names of several US states - for example, Virginia for tranquility, and California for tech-savviness. After all, the United States is where I had previously wanted to go for university. Though it had denied me and subsequently I had denied it, I, as well, am deeply entrenched in the impressions of my own creation - they now have become a concave mirror of what I did, and a convex mirror of what I aspired.
Friday, April 3
4/3
My first spring break is near its end, and during, I booked an airplane ticket to China for the summer, talked with Gao for an internship, which, actually is an assistant-level job in a language teaching establishment in Shanghai, took multiple showers, brought my Battlefield 4 character to level 45 and broke my girlfriend's cup with my name on it. The name tag itself isn't broken though. I also told Alin to get the Twitter handle @billie for me but somehow he didn't manage it.
Before the spring break, me and my girlfriend planned a tour to Dusseldorf. But eventually we didn't go anywhere. She watched her Chinese reality shows and did Stats homework, while I, sat on a dull, black office chair that I took from my former roommate Thomas Fisher's room before Husain came here, typing, playing, listening to music and fiddling with codes that I still don't know anything about, in front of my equally dull, but fancy laptop. I don't usually sit here though, depending on the definition of usual. My first semester was spent primarily in my girlfriend's room - a period of up and downs and an oblivion from having settled everything. It was when I started to sit back on this chair that I thought of resuming my writing. I don't know about the exact reason, youthful dynamic or a failed attempt to appear that way, but in the end I'm glad I did so. On the chair, are musings occasionally imaginative that take me away to places mundane yet fantasized, but more often there are blandness, repetition and a forged sense of being intellectual.
I bought the airplane ticket from Lufthansa, a carrier that carried me here and is about to carry me back, with a secret apprehension of plane crash while taking flight home previously deemed unique to me but later proved to be a human universal. The ticket price was a little more than 600 euro, and I paid with the direct debit option which hasn't appeared in my transaction list and which I fear never will, because my PayPal account is limited. My departure is after dinner on June 2nd, and arrival one day later in the afternoon. I have promised Gao that I'm going out for dinner with him. He has two jobs, one at the teaching establishment I'm about to go and the other, a bar in Shanghai whose Swedish general manager is a drug addict, impaired cognitively and earning a wage much higher than his. I messaged Gao later in this afternoon and he is still working, for it's weekend and a lot of people, privileged or merely desperate, come to the watering hole to pour liquid into their mouthparts. That is how humanity plays out in the socialist city of Shanghai.
Two days ago, when I was copy-pasting something from the iCloud, a reminder that reads "Remind me to rethink my choices" came up. I cannot determine when it is set up. But I presume it is from a year ago, during one of those sleepless nights after my destiny had been determined, I lay on the bed swiping the screen of a then-new iPhone 5s, unconfident about everything to come, put down those words to remind myself in the future. I didn't know of what I'm reminding myself. I still don't know. I sent a reminder from a year ago. Now I have received the reminder. I'm reminded.
As I write, I turned to the left to pour myself another mug of orange juice I took from the servery with the black kettle - my girlfriend bought it before she met me. On the desk are a ragdoll she sent me as a gift, two spray bottles of human cosmetics and screen cosmetics, a leftover tray from lunch with remnant of Chicken Leg dipped in unused Tex-Mex sauce, and a glass filled with pickled cucumber, everything but stationary, nothing but life.
My girlfriend is watching reality show on her laptop. I cannot see the image from this angle. But I heard a baby girl crying in the background. For something that is neither touching nor dehumanizing, her cry in the screen is as sad as bodies on the battlefield, and as poignant as the fleeting of life.
Before the spring break, me and my girlfriend planned a tour to Dusseldorf. But eventually we didn't go anywhere. She watched her Chinese reality shows and did Stats homework, while I, sat on a dull, black office chair that I took from my former roommate Thomas Fisher's room before Husain came here, typing, playing, listening to music and fiddling with codes that I still don't know anything about, in front of my equally dull, but fancy laptop. I don't usually sit here though, depending on the definition of usual. My first semester was spent primarily in my girlfriend's room - a period of up and downs and an oblivion from having settled everything. It was when I started to sit back on this chair that I thought of resuming my writing. I don't know about the exact reason, youthful dynamic or a failed attempt to appear that way, but in the end I'm glad I did so. On the chair, are musings occasionally imaginative that take me away to places mundane yet fantasized, but more often there are blandness, repetition and a forged sense of being intellectual.
I bought the airplane ticket from Lufthansa, a carrier that carried me here and is about to carry me back, with a secret apprehension of plane crash while taking flight home previously deemed unique to me but later proved to be a human universal. The ticket price was a little more than 600 euro, and I paid with the direct debit option which hasn't appeared in my transaction list and which I fear never will, because my PayPal account is limited. My departure is after dinner on June 2nd, and arrival one day later in the afternoon. I have promised Gao that I'm going out for dinner with him. He has two jobs, one at the teaching establishment I'm about to go and the other, a bar in Shanghai whose Swedish general manager is a drug addict, impaired cognitively and earning a wage much higher than his. I messaged Gao later in this afternoon and he is still working, for it's weekend and a lot of people, privileged or merely desperate, come to the watering hole to pour liquid into their mouthparts. That is how humanity plays out in the socialist city of Shanghai.
Two days ago, when I was copy-pasting something from the iCloud, a reminder that reads "Remind me to rethink my choices" came up. I cannot determine when it is set up. But I presume it is from a year ago, during one of those sleepless nights after my destiny had been determined, I lay on the bed swiping the screen of a then-new iPhone 5s, unconfident about everything to come, put down those words to remind myself in the future. I didn't know of what I'm reminding myself. I still don't know. I sent a reminder from a year ago. Now I have received the reminder. I'm reminded.
As I write, I turned to the left to pour myself another mug of orange juice I took from the servery with the black kettle - my girlfriend bought it before she met me. On the desk are a ragdoll she sent me as a gift, two spray bottles of human cosmetics and screen cosmetics, a leftover tray from lunch with remnant of Chicken Leg dipped in unused Tex-Mex sauce, and a glass filled with pickled cucumber, everything but stationary, nothing but life.
My girlfriend is watching reality show on her laptop. I cannot see the image from this angle. But I heard a baby girl crying in the background. For something that is neither touching nor dehumanizing, her cry in the screen is as sad as bodies on the battlefield, and as poignant as the fleeting of life.