12/12

My evenings are full of vulnerable moments. In the absence of daytime's social facade and no longer surrounded by things that I am trained to care about, I become more naked than I want to be. The strain from the inelastic wool of the work clothes starts to disappear the moment I drive off from work and fully recedes a couple of hours after dinner, after all the dishes have been done. Revealed in its place are a pair of fleshy unadorned legs which are only covered near the top by a sliver of sweatpants. The underlying legs have remained pretty much consistent for as much as I can remember, as the layers covering them switched from school uniforms, pajama bottoms, jeans to suit pants, each indicating a slightly different era with its own corresponding mood. In the evenings the whichever layers that were on during the day are temporarily shelved onto the side, along with what the layers are supposed to represent, student life, career, pomposity or the lack thereof. Left behind is just simply me in the most rudimentary form, stripped of history and probably also dignity.

The anguish, affection, eloquence and restraint that have provided me with ample air cover during the day vanish. But increasingly I am less certain whether the things that do remain are intended to be at the forefront at all, or exactly what those are. For many people as they traverse farther in their lives these concerns matter less as they accumulate layers to cover up what is underneath. But I have never been fully comfortable with this idea: covering up the thing that I do not understand with more understandable layers does not quite aid in the understanding of anything; it aids in its postponement or even concealment. When the layers are plentiful during the day and there are many people with the same, I blissfully focus on making money through looking at the screen, greeting the lady at the bend of the staircase, and attempting to further my chances both in career and in life. In the evenings these seem remote and almost idyllic, and indeed everything seems more remote and hence idyllic, aside from the revealed legs and the slippers, which look like rebars sticking out of a derelict building which still looked fine in the morning, or the backside of the laptop when it's shiny anodized aluminum backplate has been removed and dust is coming out. They are certainly telling, but I mostly do not understand what is said.

There are very few things I really understand, and even fewer things I'll accept. The evenings, however, do not even offer the pretext of understanding or acceptance. They encroach on the recital of the day like the pause before late Beethoven's last movement. In the evenings I take a look at the lustrous day past, bidding its farewell and waiting for its sequel.

11/25

Many goodbyes will be said this winter, and it's no strange concept to me. Amongst the many people where the goodbyes are said, most are new people with new faces, with the exception of myself, who has been constant, or has at least appeared to be. Running through these goodbyes are of course complicated affairs - a little bit of good wishes, some bittersweet emotions, and many more lunch and coffee dates that are set up because departures tend to make people less timid. During these dates there are often lively discussions about a variety of issues, ranging from the more mundane ones of career, success, friends and family, to the more vague ones such as the values and perils of upholding morality, the courage of trust and the cowardice of the lack thereof, or just in general, how to remain upright in the face of the great bending pressure of the real world. These discussions certainly don't lead anywhere. They merely provide a front for something that may or may not fully exist, which is respect with a little bit of genuine affinity, to the extent appropriate and feasible in the context of a four-story corporate office building.

The end of every episode, however brief, in my life has come with its unique flavor of being hectic in a good way. The end of one thing often implies the debut of another. Even though I have cycled through quite a bit of these, I must confess that I have never successfully come to terms with the end of anything, regardless of its nature. So I carry with me as much as I can remember, so that the debut of the new thing could be shared between me and my past. But my memories aren't quite long-lasting either. At the end I don't remember a thing no more and can only vague feel what was previously there. This time it is no different. The two years of myriad things cannot be remembered fully, nor understood, nor defined neatly, I could only feel some of the hopes and some of the despairs as the end of another episodic past nears again while I keep going on as if it's not. But of course it is, and perceptibly so. As a result, the loose ends I haven't tied up or are still churning out will probably remain loose, adrift in the inexorable forward marching of time. I could only send them off in evenings like this one, in front of a computer screen and only with a whimper, hoping that eventually some of them will be caught.

Many years ago, I once felt that "large hopes are difficult to find". But to me now perhaps as someone a bit more seasoned, finding hope and hope itself are indeed quite distinct terms. Hope, whether found or not, remains, for it isn't a concept in the school of realism, it's a product of the mind, and it isn't large or small. And I think I still have it despite or because of the past two years, evidenced by my moving around, or to borrow the words of a certain British gentleman, my many jitters. I can't yet discern what the past two years have imbued in me, or whether anything has ever been fully imbued in me. I feel I have remained more or less structurally the same, only a bit more composed here, or a touch too easy there compared to before.

As such, going back into my new life in the old country shouldn't be too dire.

11/2

Perhaps adulthood isn't so much measured by age, but by distance from the last folly. The follies in my life so far have been at first unknowingly carried out, and then with time, more intently done. But as of late, I can't quite recall when the last folly was. It probably wasn't even in this country. Over time I have learned to sense where things are going, and to believe what I sense, and very few things, especially humanly ones, manage to surprise me. Hence I simply more or less successfully maneuver around what's ahead of me based on what has and has not worked in the past. In my maneuvers there are not exquisite strategies or exact calculations. Reality often does not require such strategies and calculations to find its way. If it does, then it often means it isn't reality - it is rather my will imposed on it. Reality needs simple things, nice words for the ego, uttered through smiley eyes, feigned knowledge, demonstrated through pretty formats, and an unwavering commitment to remain agreeable, especially socially. The paradigm is widely applicable, I needn't engage too much of my mind. From this vantage point, things are not only manageable but also quite predictable. I maybe have finally understood what "overthinking" means - a unique form of hubris in the belief that one could reconcile reality with belief, rather than the other way around. In overthinking there has been much anguish that has been present for the better part of my life. By shedding that hubris, everything has felt way better. Even in the entire routine of my current walk of life, going to the office, coming back from the office, waiting for the weekend, enjoying the weekend, and getting two paychecks every month, there isn't much friction. It does not mean that friction does not spring into existence. It's just that I have become quite good at nullifying it as it pops up. I do it in the same way a cat licks itself, along the fur and not against it. And I judge the outcome by whether the fur has been straightened and disaster averted, and not through value lenses like honesty, integrity, skepticism, which are anyways dubious, overly grandiose words in the context of the current day and age.

I can however notice that many people still view the world through the many lenses they wear. And these are all different lenses. Some are a rose-tinted pair to show certain things in certain colors; some are rather magnifying glasses or kaleidoscopes that either needlessly exaggerate or abstractly complicate. Some are even just straight up projectors. And what they have seen might have gratified or disturbed them quite a bit. I used to have many pairs of them in the past, but at the moment, due to the increased eye fatigue from everything I saw, I have not worn anything, I have just my own naked eyes which make everything kind of blurry due to the good-old myopia. Sometimes I even close my eyes, as many things aren't meant to be seen, and at the same time, there are many things I would prefer not to see. Then I'll open my eyes, and go about my days amongst the blurry things. This approach has served me quite well at the present.

Adulthood, isn't it nice?

8/27

The stone house up the hill alongside Mill Plain Rd is quiet at night. When it was deep summer, the window air conditioner made a constant hum. But summer is inching to a close, the air conditioner is off now. If I listen closely, however, I can hear cars going about on I-95 which isn't super far away. The thin glass door which is also my window does not block off sound well - it does not need to, in fact, silence is not quite the absence of sound, but rather the abundance of scattered, far away rumbles. Within the stone house inside the room where I routinely sit, words and voices are heard rarely, and only through either the Sony portable speaker connected to my phone, or built-in speakers of my laptop. At the push of a button, whichever words and voices that were uttered at said time would pause and then not resume for a long time, or resume but with an entirely different tone, narrating an entirely different subject. The algorithm that produces the content on the web nowadays ensures that content is abundant enough that it is practically infinite for a human lifespan. The tradeoff would then be between the natural quietness of the stone house and its surroundings and the artificial festivities of whatever the algorithm decides to spit out. But the reality in here, I observe, is more rotational, with each option taking turns governing the room. In between the turns the stone house and the room in it sometimes feel like the central pillar of existence of this reality, through the alternating Boolean states of noise and silence, activity and tranquility, they produce and encapsulate everything that at least, given the constraint of reasonableness, is at all possible. Thoughts which only sporadically sizzle up, get mixed with them like spices on a rotisserie chicken, making up a whole and coherent culinary package. But "feel like" is never "is", the same way that "want" does not align with "get", and "need" with "have".

The stone house and its room are only part of a constellation of things that are far more grandiose and riled up. These are, for example, the corporate office that I subscribe to, the people in it, the Metro-North Railroad and the not-so-distant NYC, friends that I like a little bit, somewhat, or a lot, and the martinis, karaokes, lights that represent a roster of people that I have not even come across. In between the other things are the stone house and its room, or in between the stone house and its room are the other things. Whichever they are, their totality nourishes, chastises, educates, and eventually, assimilates me like how eyeglasses gradually become one with the person wearing them. At the beginning of each day my exit from the stone house and the room is my entrance to perhaps other houses and other rooms; and at the end of each day my entrance to the stone house and the room is an exit from other houses and other rooms. I exit, I enter, on repeat, days into weeks into months into years, and finally into decades that take up increasingly sizable chunks of my life's surface area. More and more things gradually start to make sense; more and more things gradually stop. Or more precisely speaking, fewer and fewer things are categorically definable. Things and the people creating them are coalescing into a blend of non-descript gray, around which tokenized viewpoints, emotions, and many humanly or animalistic ideals swirl around like how the myriad gas clouds, star systems, and the dusts around them orbit a galactic center.

Amidst the stone house and its room, I sit stately without committing to any interpretation of truth. The absence of the hum of the air conditioner in the background has made the room feel suddenly smaller. If previously I felt I was viscerally connected to it in some way, now I no longer feel like it. Its darkened physical boundaries have faded with nothing to replace them. As a matter of fact, I am not connected to anything. Relative to the cosmic microwave background I am moving through space at a rough speed of 370km/s, a number when timed by the seconds elapsed since when past events have occurred or until when future events will occur would explain the distance I am away from them. For now, sheltered by the stone house and its room, I sit stately.

8/14

After some time I will have to admit that there is not really a core storyline behind my many moves in the past 10 odd years. For sure, I have planned each of them meticulously, with a certain stringency that a good, steady life is not supposed to entail. However, at least in this moment, in one of the 4th-floor rooms of a stroad-side hotel in Danbury, Connecticut, I cannot really ascribe a character to the outcomes of my plan, all the while the years increasingly speed by. In Munich, I have a weekly routine that basically zigzags between the office, the Asian supermarket at Rosenheimer Platz, and my apartment, that is soon going to morph into one between the office, the Chinatown at Flushing, Queens, and my apartment. More words or even sections will appear on my LinkedIn profile, which, no matter how hard I tell ChatGPT to furnish with a better variety of English, remains quite dull. Yet, everything else that I have once held dear, the literary things, the metaphorical objects, and abstract emotions that are only felt in deep thoughts, has not managed to influence my LinkedIn profile but vice versa. Reality, or at a more personal level, realist thinking, seems to have definitively won out. Paraphrases include empiricism, pragmatism, maturity, the way it is, rationality, and FIRE. But I do not even know when the battle was fought, or what exactly is the side that has lost the war. Maybe the losing side has become the winning side, or maybe there was no battle at all. Regardless of what it was, all of it has happened in an instant of the 10 odd years, the youth of a single person.

In retrospect, there has been a great irony, one of a journey that had started in idealism, fantasy, and pursuits of things that go beyond the mundanity of what used to be my day-to-day life, and a journey that only started because it was at all costs, somehow ventured into an unknown place that feels eerily familiar. It has a different character of course, like how Germany is different from China and from the US, lifestyles, cultures, traditions and all that, but the struggle of living a life without knowing what end it has, and the toll of this thing I still don't get, "adult life", are largely the same, if not weighing down more heavily than before. Russ, my future boss, after hearing me saying that my original destination before going to Germany was the US, remarked, what a detour that was. And indeed, what a detour that was, and what a detour everything was. Maybe it is not that everything is a detour, but that nowhere is home. Most insidiously, the existence of home could be contextual. It might have only existed, amongst many other things, when I believed in them. Like a neatly built sand castle on the beach, it readily melts away after one or two waves of reality. But, after having spent 28 years being alive, and more than 10 years trying to find some sort of corroboration of what I had believed in, the search and rescue effort perhaps needs to come to a close, or at least be shelved. In my life thus far there aren't many such things as successes and failures - things happen and I am a good pupil.

Only in rarified moments, I shut the bathroom door, put my AirPods on, sit down on the toilet and listen to punk rock of which I used to be an avid fan. In those moments even the punk rock feels a tad dry, but still, two or three minutes in after the warm up, I bang my head a little.

9/27

Lately I haven't gotten to write a whole lot. And whatever I do write feels increasingly like it is written with the trembling hands of a Parkinson's patient. The closer I examine it, in words' and paragraphs' distinct lines and blocks, the more it stands out to me as some combination of background noises that seem to vaguely depict something, only to distract from a deeper, indescribable vacuity. I juxtapose arrays upon arrays of metaphors, objects, fragments of thoughts and try clumsily to weave them together into a picture that lacks context but nevertheless seeks to disturb emotionally - like a doodle of a kindergartener with very strange color choices that I don't understand, mirroring some subset of perceptions of reality, which, equally, I don't understand. And in a way, this is precisely the point. The formation of the letters and the arrangement of them, aim to amplify a residual pain which almost goes away as the normal range of human needs, e.g. hunger, greed, and the need to pee, emerge and subside. I invent them, in the same way a space exploration game invents procedurally generated side quests. These are the tissue sperms, the muscles pushing against the wall, and the jitters of electrical signals emanating from a warm corpse.

And I come back to them, to the graveyard of scrapped thoughts, to their malady and disrepair. Not to commemorate the futility as they are, but to ritually show up, as the regular alcoholic of the Biergarten, drinking to the bitterness of the many days and nights with the clash and clangs of syllables to toast. Perhaps, it is not so much that these non-thoughts are drawing me in, but rather what they represent, a fading era, in which, I, unemployed and therefore unburdened, would sit down every once in a while to record life as I saw it then, and the fact that those things that I have once seen and sought to remember by writing them down, are now only remembered with a strange clarity that dissects everything vividly, yet at the same time, to which I do not so much relate. Therefore, similar to a middle aged man, clad in suit, returning to the dance floor of his favorite night club, I return to this blog, with the addressable concerns I had back then mostly addressed, to write something as a token of me still being around, if only less vivaciously. It might have something to do with the nature of the adult life, of the emergent callousness and indifference after having been marinated with the many expected and unexpected lectures on the perils of naivety. The space for strategic maneuvers and make-belief passions feels slimmer - a twenty-seven year-old single male, a back office corporate finance worker, and a resident of suburban Munich, all of these labels take up precious space of my life's character count, leaving me little room to freestyle the twists and turns without them appearing too abrupt. And hence, I simply extend the storyline by inserting one modifier here, and another metaphor there. I am a playwright of the Season IIs.

In the evenings when I am alone, I sometimes feel homesick, but not for any of the cities where I come from or have been, because none of them interests me any more. The parties I had in them have been over, the door of the departing Uber has been shut, and the last message has been left at read. I have turned around, and to turn back would mean that the only thing I would find is their absence. And in theory I shouldn't feel homesick because everything I am homesick for resides in my brain, which has become a Möbius strip of home and the sickness for it.

So not knowing whether it's the home or the sickness for it, I stare at the dimly lit wall as blankly as I have done a gazillion times before and after, as if still puzzled, as if still trying.

10/26

In the "About" section of my website, one of the introductory sentences reads "during my free time, I maintain a blog", and above this segment of texts hangs an avatar, in which a generic anime .png of a blonde guy, who's not me, sits smilingly in front of a laptop. I know the reason I put up that picture - it is an anime figure, thus more approachable, and it is a static image of a person, so no effort is required for it to project a sense of optimism through an impeccable smile and wide gazing eyes. I'd like to look at the "About" section quite often, not to be impressed at its adherence to material design nor to polish up its terse, corporate speak, but to look at the website as how a constrained shop window would look to a passer-by. Its décor of colors, lights, and softened edges blend into the techno-selling-points of most things today, and mask everything that was left behind.

In the past I would be quick to ridicule this. But then I realize that such a reaction is illogical - I am typing on a keyboard, in front of a screen, on a chair, under a warm rooftop in the pre-winter cold, all of which are incremental results of a bullet point here, a punch line of a joke there, and the fonts, wording and colors used in some copies of .pdfs whose ultimate printed forms I do not see. By day I am that anime guy with a smile trying to project the same sense of the same things with a more spotted skin and a less styled haircut. By night the smile wanes and I start pacing around in a room which is desolate weren't it for me and a few scattered-around things. And in these gaps between working days something sometimes finds room to exist very briefly like faint glitters finding the dark how amidst the darkness there are lights being turned on in my neighbor's bathroom - I don't know what it is. I used to describe it with phrases like human willpower, nostalgia, etc., but none is accurate because of it being rather sentimental and anthropocentric. It is something statistical and universal, similar to a trough of a wave between peaks that very soon oscillates away. In these constant back-and-forth transitions, I end up feeling like how a dung beetle, who can bury dung 250 times its own body mass in one night, would feel like, if it takes a pause and examines passingly the fact that it is moving dung around. And by all means the dung beetle wouldn't stop after the said examination, at the maximum it'll perhaps move the dung a bit more half-heartedly, because evolutionarily that is how the parameters are set for it.

And in this sense the order of events that kicks off with me logging into the computer in the morning as "DE2FEA" and ends with me lying horizontally in bed in the evening starts to make sense, in the same way that the projected optimism in the avatar of my website morphs into a more believable version given enough time and a flashier design language. The nuances of each day and the pursuits of each era are different but on an aggregate level, they involve food, shelter, mating, and some play, nothing more and nothing less. And at the end of the day some of these aspects are just commemorated by either a website, or a piece of paper, or spoken words, or muscles and girths; many are just not.

So yes, a beetle, buries dung 250 times the body weight one night every night, and rolls some of the more okayish balls, under the Milky Way.

6/1

A few days ago a large crane fly got into my room, I sprayed some pesticide on it. It did not immediately die and instead struggled to fly away. So I sprayed some more pesticide on it, and then it died.

3/31

Sometimes I like to sit vacantly on the eastern end of the bed. I look at my skin and the random grooves on it which I was never aware of, and my consciousness would gradually recede to reveal the naked mechanicality of my life, in which on a daily basis I internally repeat the process of asking some random questions, providing no answers, and then conjuring up an off-topic speech to make a non-related point. Usually before long the big screen will be turned on, people will begin to sing or talk very loudly until the screen is turned off again. This is not to say that the line of events being kicked off afterwards are identical. The color of the sky, the growth of the weed on the balcony, the mood, the professional goal I have in mind, the genre of the music in the background, and the return of the stock portfolio all change numerously, even kaleidoscopically. However, at times these changes feel like the character configuration screen of an old Japanese RPG, where there are a rotating roster of gender, race, hair color, nose size, and a pool of skill points waiting to be distributed across some traits.

Occasionally things that do not fit to the theme pop up. Some of them are once mundane images of me walking down the street with a cup of latte macchiato in hand, of me getting off a car near a restaurant in a distant city, or of me peeling grapefruits - as the timeline deepens these images invariably become more succinct. The others are not images, but rather traces of smell and pieces of sound that I cannot decipher. All of them pop up very abstractly. Like the quantum fluctuations of the Higgs field. They come into existence and then disappear the same way, without context, only that I am left feeling a bit hollowed in their aftermath. I drag myself back to what I eminently and immediately have in order to shrug off the hollowness - what’s in this room and the strand of life this room represents, and realize that whatever I seem to have are not ammunitions that would help me fend off anything, but rather the hollowness itself. Far removed from when the images, smells and sounds were real, I’m left sitting by myself, like a lone passenger on a one-way train leaving his favorite city. I try to soften my posture a little so that my ass and back are less sore, only to collapse in bed and to begin to feel a little afraid.

I remember as a kid I used to go through one nightmare repeatedly, the exact content of which I have never pinned down - in it there is a dark and infinite unwinding, and nothing from this entire universe can escape from it. I could never bear witnessing it unfold entirely so I would abruptly wake up. And upon seeing the many lights and shadows that surround me from everywhere in the room, I would think that the unwinding had followed me, piercing the boundary between dream and reality. A fearful kid I was, I could only cry and fret aimlessly. Luckily the soft soothing voice of my mom, who was then a lot younger and always by me, would calm me down. She would pat me on the shoulder and put me back to sleep, and everything would once again seem fine. Many years later in another moment as I lie on a different bed, the vague fear has started to creep back. Only then I had my mother’s soft voices. Now those voices are gone. Not only that, the myriad of things that have taken place since those voices are likewise gone. All of my grandparents have died; and my mother is becoming frailer, while I stronger. I went from playing basketball with friends from my local high school to working out of an office with international colleagues, from kissing the one girl in my life without any reservation to lying alone in bed with all of the internal restraints of a calculating adult. And it seems that the unwinding has still followed. No longer a kid I am, I cannot cry and fret tonight. Only somewhere inside me the hollowness grows.

A column of shadow is being cast on the wall by the moonlight. Its black, geometric shape is a monolith with an unknown purpose. And the room where I am is left without a sound.

3/25

At night the wind just kept blowing. I cracked the window slightly open, and a gust of cold, fresh air blew on me, sneaking a sense of immediacy into a room full of old things. I wanted to step out into the balcony to feel more sincerely the evening cold, only to be deterred by the thin layer of pajama bottoms I was wearing. Last year around this time, trees had already begun to sprout and I knew it was spring. This year, however, everything had dragged on and so had the seasons.

By the window of my apartment I listened attentively to the sound of the wind, of its brush against everything in view, which was the nocturnal edition of all the intimate and familiar things I had seen in the morning. There were lights being emitted from the houses across, in the same paleness as ever; they were either lights from the television screens of neighbors whose lives I had never come across, or dining room lights, which were a bit brighter; really far-off the white LED streetlights of Pullach could also be seen, but from this distance they were mere speckles. They lined up haphazardly and a few would occasionally flicker, indicating perhaps someone had passed by, or a tree branch had shuffled. Between the islands of lights and my apartment window the wind blew, like the march of an invisible legion severing the crowd, while the shadows of trees, the dead cars in the parking garages, and the angled rooftops of houses all sat stationary in the deep, murky sky. Everything put together looked like an oddly manipulated GIF picture - it was looping ever so slightly in trivial places, and all of the colors had been converted to an unsaturated grayscale from their daytime versions, aside from the few spots of lights, which were sparse and almost distracting. From this picture no story could be extracted, not even cursive ones. If the world were a fantasy novel, certainly the protagonist would not be living in this part of it. However, I liked it, not because my wishfulness had yet again assigned meaning to where there was none, but because when I was exhausted or when my pursuits were aground it was in the very dullness of what was beyond this window where I could find accommodation. There had been a limit on how interesting, accomplished, varied, sexually prolific, socially accepted, intellectually stimulating, politically and financially adept my life could be. Placed in the context of the population of this planet or the window of existence of this human civilization, my individual being was but one of the many, just like the unknown souls in the many houses with their lights on, who would probably remain not only unknown but also fundamentally commonplace, and who, by turning on the lights as they had always been doing from one day to another day amidst the winds which had been blowing for one year to another year, had offered another soul, who was equally unknown to them and just as commonplace, some accommodation. Not comfort, solace, hope, empathy, or optimism but accommodation, and very plain accommodation indeed. But accommodated was I.

Strained for having been standing for too long, I decided to take a couple of steps back for the bag of M&M's chocolates in the fridge and grabbed a handful. Each of these chocolates had supposedly different colors, which were anyways difficult to tell under the faint lights. By the time I walked back to the window, the chocolates had been assimilated into the same grayscale extended by all the other things. I quietly went through them as I looked out of the window one last time this evening, where the wind kept blowing.

3/6

As the heart drains, so do words. At 1 AM while I lie horizontal and insomniac, in the background the screensaver lights of my OLED television shine unpredictably, projecting the ceiling lamp into shifting shadows on the wall, constituting the only illusion of movement in this otherwise still room. Earlier in the evening I have drunk coffee, not because I needed it, but because the air I breathed and the water I drank were too soothing, and I wanted to have something more pungent, something akin to a smoke break in winter without me having to actually smoke. I struggle to fall asleep cleanly, but at the same time am not fully rationally awake. Again the quietness of the night tries to remind me of a black backdrop of an imaginative story awaiting its debut, so that the dead plots pieced together from the many pasts are once again malleated into a single stage show. But the March of 2021 is so distant from any real testament to these plots that anything more than just one or two flashbacks becomes hard to obtain. Therefore the backdrop remains largely vacant, with the sole audience member frozen in his seat, amidst a sea of dark.

I remember that many a times during the night, regardless of when it was Bremen, Berlin or the more uptown area of Munich, I had lied in bed surrounded by the same darkness. Then, I always had something in me, be it missing a person, worrying about a future, or simply having an ire for some abstract, yet-known changes. There was a silent drama, a contextual clash of where I came from versus where I wanted to go. But tonight, and in the succession of nights prior, I am perturbed by nothing. I had a penchant for sentimentality, as was reflected in the music I listen to, the words I write, and the many objects I described through these words. I thought that through more varied experiences and more intense feelings, life would somehow become more porous and therefore easier. However, at the end of it I have only found a rebuttal. Not rebuttal in the sense of proving something to be false, but rather in the sense of proving something to be non-ascribable, that metaphors, sad adjectives, long clauses appended to beautiful sentences with multiple conjunctions originate exclusively from me, and bear no relationship with the things they seek to define. I merely borrow them, so that through them emotions can be discharged. The darkness in which I lie alone is devoid of emotional elements; the listing moonlight through the glass window is devoid of emotional elements; all the places, weather, outlines of people, and the literary elevations of them from the past moments are devoid of emotional elements. It is only that I, am not. As I lie half-naked in this green, foldable, polyester bed that I have inherited from the former tenant, nothing have me in them, and conversely, I have nothing in me.

I do not know exactly when the OLED television has turned itself off. I did not hear the electrical clicking sound it makes when it's completely turned off. I feel a bit apprehended and unlock the phone which is on its charger and next to me. I got this small work phone a few months back after some nagging with the IT department. Right now the only lights in this room are coming from the phone. At this hour the lights appear more glaring than they usually are, a bit like the candle lights from an age-old birthday party of mine, flooding everything else into airy little impressions, eerily removed from reach.

After some time the phone goes dark as well. And the sea of dark envelopes me, scribbling the warm regards of the day's end.

2/25

Few things are not to be forgotten this year. In this late Wednesday afternoon, in a brief respite I take from work, I have once again shut off the computer and moved away from my office chair. The afternoon in February is not as dark as the one a few months ago in December, birds have started to tweet, and enough flies have reawakened so that a few could slip through the window. Every day I have worked diligently, like any other qualified salaryman of this day and age. Through the unchanging routine of waking up and turning on the computer and a few hours later, turning it off, days' elongation and nights' protraction could almost be perceptibly felt. And in the process very little room has been left for anything else. To a certain extent, the act of leaving room to anything else has begun to feel a little antiquated and ill thought-out. I work, eat takeouts, look at YouTube, the trees, and the stock market, buy various things and erect them in my room, and debate and examine visiting friends or not visiting them with a calculated, financial exactness that has not been present in me previously. As a result, each day becomes easily dissectible, with clear, definable structures and any excess part trimmed away.

I have struggled with this way of life, because many values that I have held have dictated my understanding of how a life should be lived - that is, fully, courageously, and optimistically, and even while life at one instant is not full, courageous or optimistic, I should at least strive towards these qualities. But lately I have come to a tentative realization that both the course and the outcome of life are determined primarily through circumstances not subject to change through human willpower. Or more precisely, they are subject to change only through the willpower of humanity as a collective, but not through the cries of its one individual member. The many glorified qualities an individual might have, are a bit like the fur patterns of dogs and cats in an animal shelter, which may or may not cater to the whims of the potential owner or the fads of what is considered good for a dog or a cat at the time. And the notion that this is wrong, that cries actually should help and fur patterns should not be used to judge whether a dog or a cat is good, but instead something more metaphysical should be used, is founded on a sort of anthropocentric, normative naivety, which I still partially harbor, and which bears no causality to the realpolitik of the world.

Strangely, living without a preoccupation to give off an upbeat, teleological underpinning in everything I do has ironically empowered me to do things more effectively, or to use the phrase from my employer, to "be more productive". When I look at the computer screen, solve the countless virtual issues that appear throughout the workweek, and be compelled to drink coffee, I am no longer inconspicuously cynical. I no longer possess the urge I once had to deplore the vulgarity of the modern capitalistic system of labor as I participate in it. I simply devotedly participate, like a rice farmer deweeding his field not because he hates weed with spite or that he likes the strain of hard work, but simply because he needs to eat, and the less weed there is, the more rice he gets.

And insofar as I continue to physically chug along, I don't see a valid counterargument to it.

2/17

DROP VIEW "3060_FIN_FC_PRED"."CAPEX_FC_LOAD_1_KPI_AGG";
CREATE VIEW "3060_FIN_FC_PRED"."CAPEX_FC_LOAD_1_KPI_AGG" AS
SELECT
TO_DATE(A.FC_TIMESTAMP, 'YYYY-MM-DD') AS FC_TIMESTAMP,
A."Country Text",
ITEM,
A.UNIT,
A.DATE,
SUM(A.VALUE * 1000000) AS VALUE_LC 
FROM "3060_FIN_FC_PRED"."CAPEX_LARGE_GROWTH_1_DATE_PROCESSING_TBL" AS A 
WHERE LOCATE(UPPER(ITEM), 'BACKLOG') <> 0 
AND A.VALUE IS NOT NULL 
AND A.VALUE <> 0 
AND LEFT(A.DATE, 4) = LEFT(A.FC_TIMESTAMP, 4) AND SUBSTRING(A.FC_TIMESTAMP, 6, 2) <> '12' 
AND "Country Text" IS NOT NULL 
AND KPI_LEVEL1 = 'Capex'
GROUP BY
TO_DATE(A.FC_TIMESTAMP, 'YYYY-MM-DD'),
A."Country Text",
ITEM,
A.UNIT,
A.DATE
UNION ALL
SELECT
'2020-12-01' AS FC_TIMESTAMP,
"Country Text",
ITEM,
UNIT,
DATE,
VALUE_LC 
FROM "3060_FIN_FC_PRED"."BUDGET_2021_FINAL_TBL" 
WHERE ITEM IN (SELECT ITEM FROM "3060_FIN_FC_PRED"."FC_ITEM_HIERARCHY" WHERE KPI_LEVEL1 = 'Capex')

10/19

一个追寻者,
一条可怜虫.

6/1

Today in one of my habitual afternoons on my narrow front porch, I notice that spring has come back. The trees in front of the apartment building have amassed enough greenish sprouts that the green has become visible. I wear fewer layers of clothes at once and have already learned to appreciate the sun less than I did in winter. But this spring differs somewhat from the last, mainly because I have stayed home from the middle of March, when the weather was still chillier, and have not accomplished many things of note since then. I do not find the return of spring this year particularly relatable. The routines I have every week are all carried out from the same wooden desk next to my bed - working, learning German, and doing German homework. The memories I have with people are all from winter when the hours were still dark early and when I wore a jacket on top of whatever underneath. These usual or sweet moments have already receded, some more fully than others, but nothing new has replenished them. I am left to dwell in them, to look at them and to try to feel them like trying to gauge the impression of the sun from the balcony of a cloudy day. The birds chirping in the woods, the occasional eager cyclists riding along the road, and the added likeness of spring in the air hence feel a tad out of place with many missing parts that are nowhere to be found.

I look up to the sky. It is so bright that the shapes of the white clouds coming from the west cannot be seen exactly. From in between these clouds strong oblique lights cascade through and blast onto the concrete floor in front of my chair. I can feel a burning sensation through my pajamas but I cannot feel its warmth. Many times I have sat here and thought of many things, even though when seen retrospectively most of them are in vain or no matter. My sitting here, alone under the afternoon sun, with the entirety of my rented apartment behind, calms me in a way that I only quite rarely feel. Here, the white concrete floor is the stage, the wind blowing through the crevice on the door is the orchestra, the spring trees and the rumbling cars on Wolfratshauser Straße are the audience, and I, the conductor, unfold life's symphony into all of its unchoreographed movements.

This afternoon will be insignificant, and the day that wraps around it will be reduced to what I have written on this page. My concrete existence as of now, will turn into a shadowy silhouette, from which I neither hear nor see. This moment, when all the warmth from the sun, the green from the trees, the noises from the traffic and the fluffy pajama bottom covering my legs feel so tangible and concrete, will be frozen and gradually chipped away. And I am always marred by an inability to seize anything from it. Summer is impending and I cannot do anything about it. The months roll forward and so do I. My sitting on this chair static is but an illusion. Time has grabbed me like an ocean freighter carrying its goods - moving slowly but surely with a set origin and a set destination.

The street below my front porch all of a sudden has ramped down. There seems to be a respite from the flow of cars that I can even hear the slow grinding-to-a-halt of the S-Bahn that is at least 1 kilometer away. Aside from this there are only reigning silence and a torching sun. I lift my right leg so that it rests on the edge my chair and wrap my hands around it to, no matter what, keep a semblance of warmth from this afternoon in me.

3/13

The many late and obstinate evenings I've had in the office finally seem to have amounted to something. In a few months of time, I would have a different title and work out of a different building. I am not sure whether I would then lead a different life. I do not know what to expect and the degree to which my expectations matter.

On every workday for the past two years I have traveled to the building complex along Wolfratshauser Straße to the south of Pullach, and away from the same complex a wearier person. On the door tag of my office writes my name and beneath it, my title, and in it I drink plenty of coffee and fight soundless battles against the screen. In winter I could witness daily the changes of nights into dawns, and dusks into evenings. Nowadays the days are longer, and therefore I could see only the latter. In these two years I have won many battles that won't be understood by anyone outside of my floor. And the more battles I win, the more I am defined by them. Words like "bridge", "delta" and "basis" are becoming more and more tangible; and words like "love", "literature", "belief" less so. In books I have read about people looking forward to things in a train station, by the river, amidst a desert, on their way home from a joint dinner, or around the turn of the street - I have not read about people looking forward to things in their companies - yes through companies wages are received and lives are lived. But there no one seems to have any longing beside having a vacation, and no one uses the word longing. And therefore, I simply prepare the slides and talk about the rises and falls of KPIs through a Beamer attached to the ceiling - Net Sales is up, OP is down, Volume is up, Price is down, compared to the budget, and compared to the forecast.

There are moments in the office when, temporarily setting aside my projects and tired of drinking even more coffee, I turn my chair to the right, and only a sheet of glass separates me from the world outside. In those moments time feels static - the contours of the building on the opposite side, the monochrome of the sky, and the distant white dot created by the hidden sun form a sketch painting with abrupt and meaningless contrasts. In those moments I feel the need to miss something, or rather many things, the more recent of which I still remember vividly. I could see them, put them on pedestals, or imagine around them, but I couldn't ever touch them. Their glow coupled with the restrained white lights brimming through the clouds somehow makes the office dimmer than it actually is, and the aroma of the just-now steaming coffee blander.

I try to sit straight to see the things perhaps more clearly. But before long the loose rub of my woolly suit pants against the black fabric of the office chair slumps me back. I then turn my chair back to the left, jiggle the mouse and continue the work. In the office there are urges for me to discard these short moments of musings readily, urges for me to make some progress and progress. For me, these urges are hard to ignore, not because they are more tenable or rational than the others, but because increasingly I do not know of what lies beyond them. What is an assistant bookkeeper without his book, a pharmacist without his pharmacy, and an office clerk without his office? In the face of these types of questions I have grown routinely timid, yet no amount of my inquiry has thus far produced a comforting answer.

Instead, I type on the keyboard piecemeal the thousandth line of code for an FX effect calculation, and slam loudly "Enter" at the last line break before the report runs through.

2/19

In this wintry Sunday evening large hopes are difficult to find. My room has quieted down from the activities during the day. Compared to say, Friday evening or Saturday evening, the quietness of the Sunday evening is vastly more resolute. It is quieter because of the anticipation of tomorrow - not Gibran's dreamy tomorrow, not Shakespeare's dramatic tomorrow, but rather the more logical, easily abstracted tomorrow, full of not murders, turning points, or candles but of work emails, green Excel sheets, and cups of machine coffee, things which, come to think of them, are so direct manifestations of reality that they only make sense in context of other terms like money, greed, and the inanities of modern life. In this evening, unlike the evenings in Berlin, I could not just have a walk around my favorite square to quell my thoughts - there's no square downstairs just as there's nothing in my life for which I need to take an immediate walk. I could, however, drink tea from a glass to the side, look at some apps from the screen, and open the window.

Pessoa wrote that the perpetual hope dissolves in the darkness of the night with a faint splash of distant foam. In the black sky from my window sit the silhouettes of the morning trees. They branch out upwards, but stop short of covering half of the sky. My Sunday evening perhaps is like the trees - dormant and selfsame in the moment, less dormant but still selfsame when tomorrow arrives. The laments I have this evening will not change tomorrow. They do not even forebode it. In the free and empty evening I could picture many things, having a coffee with the person I like, going to the mountains and to the seas, volunteer in a foreign country, etc.; but there are very few things I could enact, and if I could, it would only be possible during my vacation. Therefore, tomorrow I'll as usual don my business attire, put up my corporate smirk and ride my S-Bahn.

The evening is inching deeper, and the cars on Wolfratshauser Straße are getting fewer. The debates I have with myself are also becoming less eloquent. At the end of the day, perhaps it does not matter that I concern myself with different things this evening than I would tomorrow. The transition between days might seem significant in the moment, but it is rarely the case when viewed retrospectively. I tend to grasp, savor, and keepsake moments over other moments, thoughts over other thoughts, thinking that by considering something more strongly I get to cling on to it for a bit longer - I take pictures and write for this exact reason. Though I realize eventually what gets savored are not the moments or the thoughts, but rather the metaphors and recollections of them. There's nothing of wonder about this evening, in which I sit and look around like any other evenings. Only when the evening is viewed in conjunction with the materialistic and monetary tomorrow, can I use it to fuel a certain sense of relief and righteousness in my inevitable capitulation to reality when the alarm sounds in the morning - a formulaic banner of resistance before the ready surrender.

Perhaps there have never been large hopes, just that the brave man goes forth in his bravery, while the sheepish man surrenders in his sheepishness.

2/8

Nowadays time withers by without an eye being batted. I have had many showers but few dreams. The necessity that I had in the past of having to ask questions and abide by tenets has worn off - in its place are on the surface, words like career, promotion, salary increase, jacket vs no jacket, IGM vs IG BCE, and descaling powder; down beneath scatter shreds of hope, love, and an empty antagonism. There is a full story behind each of the words, but the words together convey no novel message and accomplish no coherent whole. The things I aspired to could often be found in these words, and they would dazzle me if I dare look at them, but nothing quite corroborates them so each continues to linger singularly, like the lines in the SQL codebase I wrote for an analytics project that was later parked.

When I cherish something every so often I carry within me many added normative assumptions about it, like with career, I envision respect and a certain suspense of personal interest for the collaborative gain; with romance, I picture sincerity and genuine smiles and thoughtfulness; with friendship, I prefer it to not dilute with a difference in time or a divergence in location. These assumptions usually prove to be untrue. And the longer I have held these assumptions, the better and more capable I am of refuting them. I have a sizable reservoir of sly gestures, sarcastic remarks and terse adjectives for this particular use. In refuting these assumptions I get to feel unburdened. But because after they are refuted what I intend to cherish becomes less cherishable, I continue to hold on to them.

The reality I am faced with has the habit of being very multifaceted. In it many storylines, characters, and all shades of sanities coexist. However pompous I am, I would not regard my storyline or the world from my point of view as representative of the wider picture. But neither seems there any storyline that could be. Perhaps this is why Sartre says that men are condemned to be free and that Heidegger says that we are thrown into the world. The leftover option for me, under the curse of the freedom and being thrown, is then to attempt to flail at least more stylistically. My Barenboim collection, my work involved in the unnecessarily convoluted projects, and my bursts of obsession with good food are all part of this attempt. Tomorrow, I'm meeting with someone to whom I have barely spoken, in a coffee shop where I have never been; next week I will participate in a development center to determine how my skills can be better used by a corporation I work for; and then perhaps there will be beers, friends and some festive noises that narrate the same story in different forms and with new metaphors. For these events my dress code, the allowable amount of cologne, the words I utter and the pictures I paint will change significantly. And I shift between these events like a seasoned party animal going between parties, accustomed to the cycles of being eager and being tired without any unduly expectations or out-of-whack actions. After all, upon realizing reality as a whole as largely unalterable, I have chosen to focus my efforts on the more manageable components of it, and only concern myself nominally with the others things.

I remember distinctly though, that in the past I used to possess the capability to see things through some different lenses - in all of which a certain inner flame was burning, rendering everything I saw in hues that were more upbeat. I was marching towards somewhere. Since then I have spent a lot of time looking for that flame, through bubbly afterwork beers, hotpots, tanks, dates, anything, in hopes of finding it. And there, I have yet succeeded.

11/12

Earlier today a piece of very unfortunate news was delivered to me - Magnus, my former boss, had been hospitalized last night due to a bike accident near Harlaching, and he will be receiving his surgery tomorrow. I wish that the doctors who will be treating him take good care of him. May God bless him.

11/9

This November I have bidden a quiet farewell, one that is known but not said. These days when I meet people I hardly bother to present myself fully. In the real world there is always an implicit sense of futility. And since I, like many other people, use restraint as an insurance policy for it, farewells, usually associated with some unchecked emotions, can then be carried out quietly. Instead of the hackneyed formalities of "bye", "take care" and "good luck in life", a conversation simply ends when no new message arrives.

I do not recall exactly when I have become used to this kind of farewell as I was not. I don't think there is a moment or a series of moments that have hastened the transition. As the years go by and life progresses, something has just gradually brewed in me that allows everything to feel more palatable. I have seen many things and people being gained and then the same being lost - in between there are often some noises and fights, but those are mostly short-lived and rarely make a difference. Recognizing this, I now pick my battles wisely.

Life after the farewell is the same as it was before the farewell. Looking around, I couldn't see any material change. The world does not turn more blue or more gray because of the thoughts of an individual, though the reverse is quite true. Some bits of the morning fog seem to glisten as the clouds temporarily thin out to let the sunlight through. The cycles of weather in Munich are always mashed up together, difficult to tell apart.

In this November everything seems feeble, so was everything last November, and the November before. The mild morning light shines through the window, casting my shadow on the wooden floor - an elongated circular head that sits on top of a rectangular box with rounded corners. The trees, compared with a few weeks ago, seem looser. I can see more of the colored houses from across the woods. I am not interested in the houses, nor am I curious about the story-lines of the people living there. When I go to work, I pass by some of those houses on my way to the bus station. I see on the door tags the names I could neither pronounce nor remember. Nowadays I dare to acknowledge most things in my life only quietly or passingly, sometimes due to a lack of need, or a lack of time, or simply, a lack of reason. But interestingly the outcomes of these tacit acknowledgements aren't better or worse than those for which I have actively tried. The only difference I have observed, is the lack of repercussions from the former. Dostoevsky said: "The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment." Conversely, crimes that are committed half-heartedly and acknowledged passingly, must often go unpunished. And somehow I have learned to exploit this fact.

To me, the lights, the trees, the houses, and many other things this morning are faraway. I'm detached from them because I have no obligations towards them. But being detached from things does not mean being free. In fact, being detached from things sometimes is the opposite of being free. In this room where I am idle, I'm locked in my idleness; where I detach myself, I'm burdened by what I have let go. The misty white lights which shine through the windows, the leaves which fall from the trees, the houses which are lived by people unknown to me, collectively create a picture which I am not in.

And I reach out for something in the lump of air in front of me like a baby reaching out for its milk. But nothing is there.