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.
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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.
