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.

8/22

Soon I took refuge in the corner seat - the loud bass of the electromusic passed through the wall behind me in rhythmic vibrations, like a giant machinery pushing me from behind. The crowd on the floor were dancing to the yellow disco lights hanging above them. I looked around for the guys who came with me, failing to find them, and took a little sip from my glass of gin and tonic. The chilled tonic water sizzled on my tongue for a moment before the warmth of my body flushed it away. I had learned to appreciate the nuances that came with using alcohol, turning things and people around me into gentler, less crude versions. In the background, the music was still playing as loudly as ever - it thumped on my ear drum every half a second, asserting itself above all else. But it was also sounding somewhat vague to me - the loudness seemed to disperse with the purple and red smokes and become more monotonous. As a result, there seemed to be no rock solid things any more in this room - the boundaries were blurring, the edges eased out, and the people began to move like waves.

I noticed that on the outer surface of my gin-and-tonic glass the layer of mists was condensing into tiny droplets of water - the ice cubes had also gotten smaller. Intuitively I began to sip faster and started to feel somewhat lightheaded. In front of me a group of people were dancing to a set of lights that seemed increasingly flashy. Or rather, they weren't dancing at all - they were merely shaking their bodies around. I had the intention to talk to someone but the cascade of the music and the voices singing to it quickly overwhelmed. I became bottled in this room. And it was only 11 PM, a long way to go until the night would die down. My decision to show up in this club was not voluntary, but it was inevitable. It occurred to me as though when there was more freedom to make choices in life, there would be fewer reasons to adhere to any particular choice. So I ended up making no choice at all, merely allowing myself to be taken to places simply because going to places was to me preferable to not going to places. I couldn't pinpoint exactly what I felt when I quietly sat in the corner - it wasn't a material substance but rather the lack thereof - the lack of belief in essential oils, in playing golf, in dotted or not-dotted reporting lines, and in the future me taking the kids to the swimming pool.

Bypassing the straw I took a gulp of gin and tonic from the glass, wishing to drive the feeling away as it permeated me like the dimly lit smoke permeating the crowd. The swirling loud electro-bangs at the moment were like the background music of a movie scene waiting for something to happen, except for that nothing did happen and everything remained the same as it was thirty seconds ago. I was somewhat amused and put up a bland smile. I drank up the rest of the gin and tonic and decided to leave.

Pessoa once remarked that "what was social is now individual". And it was exactly like that when I left the club. The dry air with low levels of carbon dioxide was refreshing. Some specks of stars from afar were faintly visible. There were tire noises of cars in the city going places, and I was going back to the apartment where I would stay until the end of September. At this time of the day, walking on the streets were only people who were the patched up versions of their former selves. But which version was more real or less fake was not an answerable question and not the point.

In whichever version the solace people sought was still missing and at a distance the music went on.

3/25

The shred of blue sky that was revealed after this afternoon's rain slowly receded from the view as I sat on the S-Bahn back home. The day was a day of usual business with an early Monday morning start and a late Monday afternoon end. Sitting in front of me was the girl with whom I had inadvertently chatted up a few weeks earlier - she reclined lazily on her seat, swaying rhythmically as the cabin moved forth.

I looked around at those who were sharing the ride - a lady in her winter clothing was swiping her phone, and a dog laid between the seats that were behind mine. The loud speakers of the train announced the stations I passed by as dutifully as the first time I heard the announcements almost two years ago. I put my hands snuggly in the pockets and babbled some words to the girl and she babbled some words back - there was a particular instant in these babbles when I felt that, everything, the train, the people, the dog and all of these selfsame routines seemed to brim with a certain softness. I smiled and then peeked away.

I had no idea what I would do when I would be back from work. Nothing in my apartment room still amazed me, and nothing I could do in my apartment could amaze me. I drifted out from the apartment every morning, and drifted into the apartment every evening. The apartment was an instrument through which days transitioned into other days. But its mereness did not disconcert me - on the dotted blue S-Bahn chair I eventlessly and happily sat, waiting for the station where I could then transfer to an U-Bahn.

The sky dimmed a little as the sunset neared. The traffic lights and the tail- and headlights of cars began to stand out. Though it wasn't so much of a dazzle - through the tired eyes of a long day in the office, nothing could dazzle. But nonetheless it made the city, and subsequently me, slightly more alive.

The train gradually slowed down as it approached the Harras S-Bahn station. I got off, and took a long deep breath of the crisp wintry air. When I waited in the morning on this platform, the sun shone from the east through the trees. By the evening the trees had turned into silhouettes, impatient like the weariness of a late afterwork crowd. The girl was still following me. Her walk was a bit slower than usual, as was mine and everyone else's. But her dotted coat looked merry amongst the sea of black and grays. I tried to conjure up some words to say to her but couldn't bring about any of them - there wasn't anything in this world that was so novel that I had to say it out loud. Thus I kept on walking straight, but not so straight as to appear nonchalant.

On the escalator down to the U-Bahn station, I faintly remembered some quote about shooting stars. It said that there would occasionally in life be shooting stars, upon which we would make our wishes and then let disappear. In the rumblings of distant trains and the gusts of tunnel winds, I somehow felt better and began to walk more affirmatively.

It was still a couple of minutes until the next U-Bahn would come and pick me up - until then, I walked in my black and gray overcoat, against which the dotted coat fared.

1/9

Almost half a month after I have traveled back from Germany, I haven't any idea about what I had set out to achieve. In turn, I have simply become a more susceptible, or to put it figuratively, a more walkable person, guided by a set of believes that are now rather malleable and infirm compared with, say, when I first embarked on this journey earlier this month. I realize, that however I adorn and defend my follies with rousing appeals, seeming arguments and wishful thoughts, I remain largely helpless when it comes to confronting how things would actually work in this reality - which is always kind of rash, devoid of the bittersweetness, the caprice, and determinism that I have had the habit of ascribing to it. I have not been disappointed as much as I have been taught, of what I do not know - I just have this vague sense of being shown, like at the end of one of those interviews with the vibe of engagement a door is politely shown which is then promptly shut closed.

I used to lament when I have to sit alone in a curtained room, lit only by the solitary glow of an artificial light - sitting in it feels demeaning to me because of the deafening silence. In such a room there are no facts, only hypotheses, rootless fantasies, and half dreams that extend wildly and unrealistically outward. But now I savor it because it is more comforting for me to have the certainty of what isn't real than that of what is.

Hence I sit on this wooden chair where I have sat nearly five years ago, with my elbows and wrists drooping forward onto the desk. Through the window I see that the sky is getting darker. In the past I could see all the way to the road on the far side; I could see the street lights slowly turning themselves on, and the cars coming and going about their own businesses. But now the view has been blocked by a towering yellow mall with furniture stores and supermarkets in it - massive billboards of varied artistic designs and messages are stuck onto the side, ready to blast their lights on my face when the night falls. Familiar traffic noises, sometimes even loose vestiges of voices talking to other voices, will shine through the window with all the liveliness of this city that is my hometown. At the same time, on the streets and in the rooms the uncomforted people are still uncomforted.

It was on this chair that I posed the many questions, drew the many conclusions, and decided on the many actions which have led me to this point in life. The ideas I had at the time were not necessarily accurate, but were nevertheless temporarily inspiring - some of these ideas were, from the get-go, logically untenable, like the belief in the power of a man triumphing over his reality, or the belief that the future will be better when a deplorable past is renounced. I recognize now that these ideas are only convincing when left unpursued, since a reality, by definition, is merely an objective state of being that cannot be triumphed over, and the past, however deplorable it is considered, can never be altered, not to mention renounced. But at least back then I had these ideas and could seek solace from them. Now I have become more sheepish - having learned the extent to which many of my insistences were ungrounded, I'm no longer capable of being the idealist I once was with the same fervency. However, neither am I a realist, for to me, a realist is just an unknowing nihilist. Five years ago on this chair was a reckless young man setting out for his shiny dreams; five years later the same man sat on the same chair, looked out of the window, and did not say a word. The chair is the same chair but it has also somehow started to feel awkwardly anachronistic - the meanings once assigned to it are no longer so heartily needed and appreciated - the sparkles, the fists, the countless remembered or forgotten nights, yes they once exist - but only like the old wounds from the days past that are never quite healed but are nonetheless increasingly unseen.

Emptily I sit on the chair. The dim gray sky hovers above the buildings, and all of the nearby or faraway people walk by.

12/12

My original plan was quite simple - two years ago I had written fondly of a serene, salaried life which I then did not have - a sturdy corporate job that needn't be glamorous, an apartment to call my own, and a couple of places around the town to hang during my free time. I have achieved all of them - I now work for a DAX company in Munich, and my apartment is at the very center of the city. The surrounding area has a healthy dose of genteel vibe. Late at night sometimes it would be foggy so the traffic lights, the LED signs of the various eating establishments will sort of hazily blend in with the background darkness of the night - it often looks quite picturesque, almost dreamy I dare say. And my walking in them, my existence amongst them, when examined outwardly, will seem poetic. But I, like or unlike other people, have a tendency of never being appeased. Probably it's the lingering youth, or the set of foolhardy believes I maintain deep-down, or the fact that I'm in general a fidgety person, as a result, over time my plan has gotten more abstract, and thus, less attainable. With all of the worldly items crossed out, the rest are difficult to even describe, let alone to accomplish - ethics, love, altruism, acknowledging but not kowtowing to the passage of time, the smooth transition from the current me to the future me, having the proper level of sarcastic undertone to myself and balancing the tradeoff between the respect of knowledge and the respect of people. I can't cross out these things by making an action plan of what and how and when; and strangely from pondering these goals I no longer find the consolation which in my more desperate times I used to.

Lately, it has also gotten harder for me to portray the things that happen to me with the same clarity and poignancy as it was previously. If in the past things had gone either well or terribly, now they merely cascade down on me like odorless puffs of air - it's easy to ascertain the fact that they exist, but I have not been capable of assigning to them an apt, moving character. In this apartment I live in, which isn't dissimilar to all the other apartments I had lived in, I'm warmly surrounded by random things in random places. I'm wearing a facial mask in preparation for my trip to Shanghai in four days, and earlier I was working in the office, and even earlier I was asleep. Outside, the December Munich sky is ruthlessly dark, just like the December Bremen sky or Berlin sky - the places that have now become faraway places simply because I haven't been there, and inhabited by faraway people that I once was acquainted with but no longer am. Its darkness has nothing special within it; and the living ones under the darkness have nothing special to add to it. Wind occasionally and fruitlessly rams on my window and the cars, varying in their brands, shapes, and compositions graze against the road in a constant but usual roar - an evening bore, one might say, but according to Chesterton, "there are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people". Fair enough.

Though I haven't the idea of an interest - what is it consisted of? It seems to me interests are only of 2 types - a disregarding interest that takes place at the expense of other things, or a more reserved, appreciative interest that is only rekindled after experiencing life's great unearthing pains. At the moment I had neither of the interests - I lie for granted on my bed without an inkling of a war, and without harboring any grand resentment towards my life that can only be alleviated by drinking a beer. I simply lie on the bed, with a portion of my torso touching the bedsheet in all of body's trite familiarity. The night is steadily inching towards an utter silence that nights are associated with. The scant sounds and clamors are becoming even scanter. Happenings during the day, when people were still a bit more cheersome, are being slowly diluted away. It is often tempting to think of such a void as what's revealed after all the hustles and bustles are peeled off - that in this sort of a dark, uneventful, existential crevice, a truer facade of life is somehow represented. But there isn't a true facade so much as there isn't a false one.
-

Sitting invariably in the airport with two hours until my flight would depart for Shanghai, I'm again listening to Chopin's Prelude Op. 28 No. 4. Not that I have the need to mourn for a loss nor that I want the bland waiting hours to be cast in a particular light so that it becomes less bland - the prelude simply calms me by bringing me a certain kind of reassurance amidst the sort of underpinning naivety and futility of it all - of traveling 20,000 kilometers multiple times, or perhaps, more generally, of my capability to see things realistically and then of my refusal to then believe what I see. But, increasingly I'm confronted with the fact that there exist a set of conditions in this world of which one can never be reassured, one can either choose to accept them or to detach from them. Such as the ephemerality of the beautiful things, the stern silence that often follows them, and the reason people would sometimes drink alcohol. I have had the courage for neither - I sit sluggishly in the airport seat, with my feet shooting out from underneath. I look around at the bright swaying intermittent lights patched up against the wall and the exuberant or subdued faces all around me and suddenly begin to feel a bit stymied. I have never quite been able to understand them so much as they have not been able to understand me. I merely drift along, with the phantasmagoria of various gold-tinted pursuits: happiness, meaning, gratitude, money, becoming good at useful things, etc, glimmering on an invisible sideline, cheerleading my strand of life as I nonchalantly walk on it.

1/16

The winter chill still lingers in the air through the wretched howling wind and the raindrops are clicking on my window in a harsh, pixelated groan. I lie on the bed without spectacle like any man lies on his bed. If David Foster Wallace thinks everyone is identical through their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from anyone else, then this is the moment when I, a person usually heavily armored by words, implicit judgements, and various deep-seated internal rules, need to concede that yes, I'm indeed identical to everyone else. This, is a moment of angst, of tedium and of discordance of the mind, stemming not only from a sense of helplessness in face of reality's immovability, but also from a recognition of the fact that there exists an upper extent of human agency whose presence is not susceptible to feel-better chatterers, make-belief romances, and a healthier or less healthy diet. And it pervades my dwelling in this tiny room just like it does in many other rooms.

I continue to lie on the bed and carry out different body positions of varying twists and outlandishness and potential future reassurance of comfort. But all of these efforts are thus far empirically progressing towards an ill ending. To rub salt into the wound, the yellow furnitures that surround me would crack haphazardly in tiny explosions of the wood - blam blam blam, leaving me jerked and wondering like an idiot. My significance as a human male seems to diminish mechanically with each of these explosions. Perhaps in some other rooms in College Nordmetall or elsewhere, furnitures are also exploding, with their respective persons, tender or strong, hopeful or disillusioned, social or reclusive, witnessing time's passing-by in a kind of collective symphonic chore of life. Leopold Bloom muses in his square in Ulysses "Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.". It's been a while since I last had blood washed off me; and it'll take a while for me to kick the bucket; I am in the middle of these two, a tiny fraction of the middle as a matter of fact, yet my belief in its uniqueness remains puzzlingly firm, or rather, "settled by a warm human plumpness", as Joyce would put it.

The corridor is resolutely silent. The Sunday evening crowd of some Korean woman's birthday party is quelled. And nary a sound can be heard. I wonder secretly if I too, should brace myself up for the likes of YouTube or LRB - the external, pampering things on screen and on paper - though my timidity that results from having only worn a pair of underwear makes such a move quite unseemly. So I decide for the next hour, to languish on the bed until sleep. I, and I alone hidden behind this third floor window, with brownish light oozing through the curtain and a man wide awake inside, am so uncreative to the point of banality - I wiggle my fingers around this wad of smartphone like a child on a piece of chocolate, fondling the touchscreen with all the raw adeptness that the youngsters of this generation have. This posture of lazily holding a smartphone in bed is one so automatically post-modern that it tends to make everything else less tenable - suffering, death and the process of growing older from a young man seem frail and irrelevant amongst all the mental candies of the user interface in which I so readily indulge.

I suspect, that everything I have thought of on this bed, in these few weeks, in all weeks, has also been thought of by some other people, perhaps less intently so that their thoughts don't oblige them to write them down. Maybe they would instead dismiss these thoughts as mere anomalies of their mental process. But I am not in a position to make such a claim, or to make any claim, because who am I, but one person with his own thoughts. When I cross other people in my path their existence always fascinates me - their burgeoning young and old faces, colorful and monotonous clothings, the way they walk and their peaceful surety of it, and their vague optimism and dismay towards their strand of life different from my own.

The night is late, and my room has begun to blend into a sort of abstraction. Otherworldly definite indefinite sounds and sights swirl by like my mom's lullaby that I don't remember, and I surrender to another of a night's sleep in the same underwear's timidity and unseemliness.

1/13

In this Saturday afternoon on these carefree pages I realize that I am no longer sad. Not that I intend to have fun through the usual venues of eating and drinking with friends, just that, I am in a peaceful state of disrepair, free from any physical threat and unable to be compelled by motivations. It would be more apt to say these sentences if I am reclining on a checkered woven chair on the summer balcony surrounded by trees of vibrant colors and the birds that chirp on them, perhaps in a medium-sized city run through by traffic that is neither bustling nor spare, but is only constant. But I am not - I sit on where I have usually sat, amongst various screens turning themselves off and the buzz of the ventilator that is still on.

I crack open the curtain to see the whiteness of the January sky, freed from the elation of Christmas and the New Year that now as if didn't occur and watch these lines of words forming out of a vast absence of any restful things that occupy me - the planes, tanks and machine guns many are imaginarily combating, the guitar string that spastically fiddles, the documents and projects and all the wistfulness of dreams that wait to be accomplished appear not very dissimilar to the ventriloquists of an aimless parade touring around an empty building. I am more moved by the freshness of the lawn that sits immovably outside, the archaic softness of my own pillow and the quiet lament of the piano. These things strike me as more lucid and more readily appreciated than the high and tantalizing edifices of humanity that have thus far so eagerly catered to the whims.

I imagine walking on the misty street that stretches away from beneath this room, singing a childhood song that intones in the frigid cold as the northern wind blows on the dormant ground and the treetops waver in my childish fugue. Meanwhile, distant apartment windows, ablaze from their inner warmth, shines sprinkling lights through the gray twigs into nowhere. I find wonderful companionships in these images - in their dilapidation I find calm; in their ancient expanse I find a sense of direction and in their subtle quiescence I find liveliness. But as with all the imaginations, the moment I step out and even only quiver at the thought of going to the trees, I cede into the tormenting cold and my utter diminution. I prefer my tired progression in life affairless and embossed only in hopeless yearnings and occasional twitches of the mind, while I unremittingly revel in my fantasy of the distant winds, stifled laughters, and the wild serious sex that I unsexually have, even though the winds might have long stopped, the laughters disappeared and the sex orgasmed. I revel not in their lush presence but in their unascertainable absence, in their gradual but inexorable paling, and in their passages of a past long past away.

The apartment window hangs there in a cold emotionless suspension. The merry gray sky has rescinded into a sort of deep fluorescent blue. These clouds and fogs, selfsame and perpetual, drift around and around into the highness of the space, into another of the day's end like the an anonymous and forever ode. I stand amongst what is left of today: my head tilting upward and my mouth half-open, in this absurdist reverse painting of my own sterrennacht.

So I, rattled by these soulless abstractions, mournfully twist my fingers into a tentative circle, as if seizing, as if letting go, of this turbid evening air.

1/12

It is always easier to figure out the twists and turns in literary metaphors than to face the profound patience of the real world. I miss the smell of morning coffees on the long-distance train. But the morning coffees don't exist as much as I couldn't really miss a smell, an olfactory sensation, in words, which are conjectures of the mind. I was traveling from Munich to Hannover on the train, in the morning and without much sleep the prior night. I needed to renew my residence permit; the "Morgen" from the train stewardess sounded formulaic and insincere; and I was troubled by the state of my haircut, while the coffees, steaming in those brownish plastic Deutsche-Bahn cups, past by me under my blurred vision and an utter disinterest to pay. The smell of morning coffees coupled with the sweet rays of sun on the horizon, the moment of warmth and fresh feelings of a journey and of everything starting anew, stands only in my distant awareness, hovering with a false and fragrant bitterness that I have not gotten to taste.

I live off these metaphors amongst all my pulsating urges to eat, sleep, walk around, and look at things. I distill what I understand and remember of the real world into unperturbed, abstract pieces, and store them in my mental reserve like the photos in my Google library, not to supplant the dull, eventless days, but to decorate them with my hopes that, despite their dullness and their eventlessness, they, as well as my life in them, have meaning, in precisely the way I envision meanings to be. So when I cook ramen noodles at the stove, sit on toilets and scratch my head when it itches, I get to overlook the fallibility of life that underpins these actions - my immune system is fighting off infections, my digestive system is getting energy from what's left of the food this afternoon, my toes are occasionally twitching, and I, sitting on the bed with pillows and quills covering everywhere, am typing on the keyboard in a state of spiritual nobleness while the dusts from my skin dance invisibly in the air with Engerer's Chopin vibrating off my speaker.

The furnitures of this room, the walls, and the milk cartons are rendered with an orange hue from the late evening lamp. The brightness shines down from near the top of the cabinet and spreads on the table like a piece of butter I cannot eat, and grows gradually feebler towards the more insidious places of the room. As usual the outside noises, always sporadic and lazy in their composition, lift somewhat the weightiness of my whole body on bed, before it resumes and relapses into the pull of gravity. Aside from this room on the third floor of this residential college, I have not known a place that captures more duly the inaction, the tedium, and the permeating immaterial blandness of a twenty-something life, looked forward to as that of hopes, enthusiasms, and excitements, and remembered as a series of fond memories of crispy red lips, gentle skins, and tight jeans that are the youth. I admire greatly those who are staying outside on this time of the day, telling words to each other and drinking alcohols to make the words more relating and believable. Or maybe they are just eating pizza, with a couple of them sitting together neatly around the table, chatting away time in senseless mumbled sentences. It seems an agreeable way to combat life's vacancy. But strangely my interest in these activities has never been greater than my awareness of myself being in them. I tell funny jokes and put up a laugh so authentic that all of my prior restraints would melt away like the sand dunes in a storm, only for them to come back later like the hollowness of an empty room when the festivity has ended and the lights have been turned off.

The mood begins to take on a more positive note as the Chopin has changed into the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata No. 32. I appreciate the way classical composers manage to convince me of the virtue of optimism with such pathos and hope. "After all! After all!" - they yell at me through the notes in a calm despondence and bliss, in a state of ecstasy that almost borders on the sadomasochism. And as the piece slides towards its unwilling but inevitable end, the last lights of today's passing are boxed in firmly behind the curtain, from the same building to which I am eternally subject.

I lurk myself further onto this side of the lamp, and onto the blue twilights of a laptop screen with dead pixels. The flame of my 23rd year continues to burn low under the rim of this ceiling, amidst the random footsteps and a beveled corner of my beloved magazine. While I, for the last time today, gaze around with sparkling eyes, into the echoless dark.

1/10

There was always something unsettling to me about a large crowd of students having dinner in the cafeteria. The roomful of muffled words, the laughters in between, and the sounds of a collective ding as the forks touched the plates betrayed a sense a youthful innocence like the celebration of a big party. Tired or drunk people were leaving constantly for cold and dark places; yet the celebration went on regardless, in a rather triumphant, everlasting rhyme. And everyone could participate in the celebration; there were no fees for entrance, nor was there penalty for exit; I participated in it when I was the more junior of the students there. But nobody embodied the celebration as much as the celebration embodied them - it seemed, as if when people finally left with the contentment and drunkenness and triteness of a finished party, they have left everything behind, bits by bits, irrevocably without even realizing it.

I had left long time ago. An inner emptiness first began to alert me to everything outside of the party. It was quieter out there, more reserved in the posture for smile and complaint, and gentler and more respectful too. The sunlight that shone through the large windows during summer was replaced with one moon and a few faint stars in the northern sky. The juice machine remained in where it had usually been, the ladies from the catering company Apetito all sat there in front of the cash machine, nodding approvingly while I carried my tray full of food towards them, and, as their delight and professionalism lasted longer and more persistently, my feigned politeness turned into real politeness, and eventually into a vague sense of weariness like the yellow banana lying amongst the food. I reached into my pocket for the plastic campus card with the picture of a fresher person, acknowledged the staffs for their services, put the card back into my pocket, said hi to a couple of familiar faces in their familiar tones, picked up the tray and walked back towards my room. On my way out, the hum of the people did not dim a decibel, and the warm winds from the hallway caressed my face with the same rosiness like when I first came in.

Departures were the saddest when people had to leave, from a place to another place, or from one walk of life to another. The actual moment when they had made the decision to leave, though, was far less distinct. During that time, the other people around were still woefully unaware. And often it was better for them to remain that way - the fickleness of human sentimentality allowed only for brief bursts of grief and farewell, and sometimes, no farewell at all. And hence, when I went back upstairs, hardly anyone had bothered me with such formalities.

Mere meters away from the cafeteria the noises had been dampened into a relic of the past. Corridors and white lights and I were lined up in a perfectly linear progression. The fuzziness of a warm inhabited room was replaced by the ruggedness of a functionalist interior design. Every five seconds the black doors that were embellished into the wall swooshed by. Behind them were either humans or the absence of them; in front of them was me, walking down the path as men have usually walked, surrounded by a ring of silence made up of dead air. Distant people also seemed to be walking; their feet clip-clopped on the ground, meandering downstairs and upstairs and into their room and into their cafeteria, their voices cheerful and remote.

Through the same pair of dorky glasses I had always worn I gazed forth with an empty conviction, with my hands attached to both ends of the food tray, and my belly slightly protruding to compensate for the weight. I was walking on a pair of leather shoes I bought from a Karstadt near Stachus back in Munich. In them I wore a pair of black socks I had put on earlier that had strange stripes and ugly logos that would run up my ankles. I was also wearing jeans with a fresh pair of underwear inside. The jeans were rubbing against my legs just like the underwear was rubbing against my ass. My woeful unawareness of their presence bequeathed me a sense of reassurance of my own impeccability, and my mind was then free to roam in an endless series of self-referencing metaphysics about the soon-to-be-eaten dinner. Myriad other things also flashed by my mind and I remembered nothing about them. The fickleness of my sentimentality only allowed for brief bursts of deep examination and provoking thoughts, and sometimes, no thought at all.

And just as I was about to reach my room, a sudden emptiness struck me the same way the immensity of an immense building struck a disinterested visitor. I grabbed the keys from my right pocket as I approached a black door that was embellished into the wall, the one with my name tag hung next to it, and beeped in.

In there, was all that is my life, in this College Nordmetall, in this Bremen-Vegesack.

1/1

Literature has been my retreat. Not retreat from school, the world, friends, or the weather - for if those would bother me, I could always play a few games and read a couple of books. In fact, as dull and anxious as the weather in Bremen is, on YouTube and many other places a blue sky is always within reach. Literature has been my retreat only in the strangest and the most timid of moments - when surrounding this apartment are only sound-activated lights and an endless stretch of not many streets of Northern Bremen, on the internet is a New Year joyfulness that has begun to subside, and on the bed is myself leaning vertically against the pillows. During these moments the combat for a continued and bettered existence calms somewhat, and everything, the computer, the bowls, the papers and books and magazines, and my old jeans, is tucked in place like a warm kitten sitting by the fireplace. My times in Munich, even my times in yesterday recede to become a sort of fond narration - the red railway light by the 7th S-Bahn line, the pink soy milk carton, team lunch on the third floor of the twisted brutalist corporatist cafeteria building, my red-and-black mountain bike parked near Preysingstrasse, and the riverscape of Isar - I am folded away in these metaphors of impression, vaguely real but never real again, like the smiles and clamor on an old marriage certificate.

I dot this white page with the words to allay the weight of these impressions, just as after watching a good movie, I listen to the sounds of vendors and taxis and bakeries to distinguish the realty of this world with another, and consciously or unconsciously reminisce I don't know what scene from what movie, and I don't know what snapshot of emotion from walking down what street.

An image of my childhood rises up from nowhere. In this image, there aren't any objective things - in it are only my grandfather whose face I don't remember, me whose thoughts I don't think, and a backyard on the back of my grandparents' home, colored in varying shades of sweet grayness. I retreat into this image with both of these figures unperturbed. Like a Japanese tourist taking picture of a tree and examine the liveliness of the photo, I take a picture of the backyard with words and proceed to relive its meaning - the content gladness of the grandfather, the innocent naivety of the child, and the bare timelessness of the backyard seem almost artistic.

I half-emptily gaze in front of the virtual touchscreen keyboard, and proceed to recline a bit further into the pillow. Nothing quite compels me in this winter and in this room. The occasional cracks of firework outside stir up the night sky like a pinch of sugar in a steaming coffee mug, registering its strange, exuberant existence only so long as to pique a notion of its presence before dissipating. This morning I saw white fluffy clouds in place of the fireworks; they were drifting eastward with the steady amorphousness that clouds have; the same blue sky mingled in-between them, like some sort of daytime lullaby for the unoccupied man. I don't know whether it's still cloudy right now. The pure darkness of the Bremen sky hasn't the usual halo of light pollution I'd used to see, all I see is a depthless veil shrouding my window with its tamed, but perhaps still bitterly chill. The bed lamp is the only source of light in this room beside the eerie yellow glow of my "TrueTone" display. In these scarce moments when I am not consumed by the inanities of consumable contents on the web, I am instead consumed by the inattention of my own consciousness. While I know that judging from the perspective of someone standing in the corridor, I am but one of the tenants behind one of the closed doors, the sense of distance between me and everything else always hinges on what I presently see and feel and irradiates outward in my decreasing knowledge and concern. In my room in my apartment is silence, therefore however fresh and heartfelt and restless the faraway people playing fireworks are; their smile, their excitement, their sparkling eyes are but formless pieces of my mind, arranged in a twist of slipshod abstraction, in the leftovers of imagination.

I'm mildly a bit drowsy after only 12 hours of waking up. Like a battery mostly drained, I lose the confidence in a reality that was once firmly grasped only a couple of hours after dinner, and continue to live in the aftertaste of an increasingly unrecognizable world. If in the morning I see the objects of a blue sky, clouds, people walking everywhere in different directions, and my own clothes draping down from around my shoulders, now I see only flimsy little metaphors of them - the pungent green of the lawn no longer is pungent, but is only colorful; the poignant pronouncement of the NPR Morning Editions no longer is poignant, but is only audible; in the morning I said: happy new year, in the evening I say nothing. The vestige of the this day seems not so much different from the vestige of last year - an endless stream of colorful things flows past me like a river flows past its bank; while my mind rests on my factless body on a factless bed.

Though I do have some raisins on my desk. Those I would still like to eat tomorrow morning.

3/17

Bremen had started to rain
Again
In my daily morose
Of having carried out life

3/4

I'm quite fond of the room that I've gotten. The whole area of roughly fifteen square meters, perhaps twice or three times larger than the room that I had back in Berlin, is mine, and mine alone. Without the mental prerequisite of having to accommodate a roommate, I get to indulge myself in the great liberty of having neither a so-to-say life nor a particular haste in maintaining it.

The sole downfalls I have observed thus far, are the dodgy silverfishes that occasionally spring up, and the nocturnal scenery through the bedroom windows. The former I would promptly put out, yet the latter leaves me helpless. My room is situated towards the more academic side of the campus, where there are lanes that allow the students to pass between different classes and their room. These lanes are lit during the night with a very inconsistent set of lamps. From a total of nine lamps I could immediately count, five are emitting white-colored lights while the remaining four are emitting yellow-colored lights. If I could accept such idiocy with the usual spiritual victory of having had accepted a wider and more general idiocy in this campus, I couldn't really come to terms with the perpetual luminance with which they shine. Every evening, when I pull up the curtain, I would be bedazzled with a maelstrom of white-and-yellow dots that seem to assert their existence as the foremost condition of the evening; when I drop the curtain, a sizable variety of shapes, from parallelograms to arrows to oblique lines would beam themselves onto the upper three sides of the wall with a matter-of-factness of a PowerPoint presentation - and among many other things, a PowerPoint presentation is at the relative bottom of what I would appreciate before sleep.

Almost tantamount to the lady's cough at a piano concert or the single dead pixel on a newly purchased phone, the bare-bone exuberance and artificiality of the lights make my life today almost more tangible and realistic than it actually is, thanks to a visceral and overarching rage that it induces. When I lean on the windowsill with the inner hollowness that it takes to look at the stars and ponder upon their meaning, nine inevitable rays penetrate my retina and begin to flash like PSY's Gangnam Style. And it is grotesque and almost entertaining to witness the careful assembly of words, music and thoughts and the swift collapse of them all after. Simply no philosophy of Sartre could match the might of BuzzFeed, no prelude of Chopin could mimic the chill of K-Pop, and no composure of me could stand the invasive lighting at the Jacobs University. I would then close the curtain like a concert conductor at a beer pong party, leaving only after the mental readiness for the pong and before the physical sacrilege of the beer.

When I'm shut off in the bedroom, there is not really a sign for me reaffirm the world outside. David Foster Wallace wrote, "Everything in my immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence". Most of the time I have not the effrontery to act upon what he has claimed. However, when I'm alone in my bedroom, as when myriad other men and women are alone in their bedrooms, surrounded by all the parallelograms and lines, screens and slippers, wine glasses and books, toilet seats and water taps, I no longer feel the obligation to subscribe to the background impulse of coquetry as I would when I'm more connected with other people. I would not have to button my jeans completely; I would not have to sit upright; I would not even have to speak to be understood.

But my self-absorption was interrupted when a gentleman screamed self-absorbingly in front of the building; he was uttering something to another person, but I was not able to register what he meant because his words were already too far apart when they reached my bedroom. I heard "like", "I", "just", some laughters in-between, and a lot of emotions. Then, the voice subsides, the laughter stops, the emotion disappears, and only the low hum of the wind scraping against the earth continues. I presume that the voice is still lingering somewhere, but has simply become more inaudible as the gentleman is more distant from me.

I'm now sitting on my bed sheet with the little stars on it, thinking about the hotpot tomorrow that I'll eat with a group of friends. There surely would be voices, laughters and emotions when we convene, followed by a return of silence when we leave. I'm glad that I would be having hotpot with friends tomorrow, yet sad that we'd eventually have to leave, and I don't know which way should I feel.

I'm slightly puzzled and a bit tired - and I've got nothing to put forth anymore. I'd just fidget a bit more and sleep.

2/25

The sky this morning was a bit grayish from having rained. I saw, through the window only a bit subdued white. I was the first person to rise up and leave, with neither the festivity of a finished party, nor the relief of a landed plane. It took a certain kind of courage and emotional transition to be able to just walk away. Every day I willingly commit myself into various prisons, and after 150 minutes, out of them again.

I would usually bring a pencil to write down a few notes; however eventually I realized that these notes were not written down for the value that they supposedly convey, but were for my reassurance of feeling the tip of the pencil sliding across the paper, amongst various predetermined lines. I would shroud myself with an almost Islamic relief when I sensed the pencil's quiet brush - the black trail of ink that it left behind just so animated, persisted, and meant. Though like having sex, the process of opening a notebook and beginning to write was distinctly dissimilar from the closing and ceasing of it. Weary of the back-and-forth inflation and deflation of my elatedness, I opted instead to bring the book of Infinite Jest. A hefty piece with a page count that I seemed unlikely ever to match. Possibly due to its verbosity and weight, it represented to me something almost much more earthly and intransient. When I held the book, I had the same simplistic joy of holding up a wad of brick, and was somehow emboldened to declare war on whatever that had dared to fuck with me. I read the book in-between sessions of the Diversity Management course like having a thought in-between non-thoughts during a trip from Bremen-Vegesack to Bremen-Burg, not for the actual advancement of human affairs, but for the masturbation of it.

Grabbing the umbrella from to my left, and the book from to my right, I acceded towards the door as if I had maximum-volume punk rock blasting in my ears. It was moist, windy, and slightly cold as Bremen had always been. The lane immediately in the front had almost a layer of mud upon it. But I stepped over it with the gist of a mini-stampede. Like an anonymous pedestrian leaving the warmth of a street-side cafe and unto the rain, I opened the umbrella with a certain resignation and grace. I walked diagonally towards a residential college where I didn't reside. And under my umbrella, I was joined at first by a gentleman from Pakistan, and then by a lady from Belarus. Though soon after turning left, they both went away.

In The Prophet, Gibran wrote "we wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us". And henceforth, amongst the howling wind, amongst the scattered mutters of the passing students, and amongst the silent pirouette of leaves from afar, I wandered alone.

The handle of my umbrella pushed me in its firm grip the tenderness of a wildflower. I stood briefly at the door, retracting the umbrella to its original shape, and resumed into the staircases of College Nordmetall. The drops of rain were falling still, collapsing themselves on the windows at the corridor. They formed sheets of water that blurred the landscape outside. And the contour of my own reflection was barely discernible; but I could tell immediately that it was me, blended in with sky.

Like a car that was parked in the garage when both the speaker and woofer were turned off, the moment I entered my room and the black wooden door was shut behind me, all of the metaphysics that had previously been tacked onto me were sieved out like the lyrics of my favorite song. I sat down on a dull and strange silence, while the dim lights lightly quivered at the curtain that was just closed.

2/16

I woke up nonchalantly, with an abrupt and disregarding start. I hadn't a dream last night. As the commanding whiteness of a morning sky began to seep through a slight separation between the curtains, my body braced itself artificially yet ruthlessly upward. I twisted my head as if to examine myself and only halted because all I saw was an empty slump in the middle of the pillow. I walked in perpendicular to the bed, turning after three or four steps to the left, and opened the bathroom door in a compact series of interlocking metallic sounds.

The light in the bathroom shone with almost surgical brightness. The frail man in the mirror flinched automatically like a beer bottle. Amused by his outright stupidity, I put up a tender smile and looked closer - the face was roughly symmetrical with a touch of animalism that I'd learned to ignore. The two nostrils, delineated with some sort of in-between wall, contracted in a rhythmic, ever-lasting dance. The eyes are sitting comfortably in bones' enclave, pointing towards different directions like a pair of chained-up squirrels. The lips were a bit dry, but still reddish - I mused, it was such that this young, vulnerable, wishful, certified penis-bearing gene gun was presented on the market. And not without an oversized slice of self-importance, the man brushed his face like an African wildcat licking its fur.

"What kind of morning is this?" Impatient, I retreated into the shower with leg's artful glide. My fingers curled unto the handle and rotated left, and the water came down with a mushy steam that clouded the glass container, where a body could be seen to move with all of its visceral, vague sense of beauty. I held my breath intently as the foam of shampoo was first applied, and then washed away, and silently stood there to feel the water's irrevocable flow. After perhaps an eternity of warmth, I turned off the shower, and walked out.

Everything was all of sudden different, as if I became more judgmental in an instant. One ought to describe such difference not with adjectives, but with a quick collection of nouns: morning, class, breakfast. The shower somehow lifted me from a smothering tedium of emptiness into an smothering array of things upon which I construct my inscrutable edifice. These things were quite like hunger, thirst and yearning, but in reverse order, epistemologically distinct but functionally similar. Compelled by these things like I would by hunger, thirst and yearning, I grabbed the black overcoat and headed out - the traffic condition was quite good today; the road was clear, and there wasn't any need for me to adjust the course. Yet it was at this moment, the engineering marvel of being me was shattered. There were not many engineering marvels at the servery on 7:30 AM - but in the systemized movements and unbending determination of the way the few were eating breakfast, I felt a Renaissant push like an egg cracking on the head of a poet.

I consumed a few pink eggs produced by several far-away female chickens, and piled the two coffee cups made from several far-away trees, and went for the class amongst several far-away buildings. I was surprisingly fine. I galloped forth quite steadily even when I was not paying too much attention to the ground. Like enjoying a sip of whiskey on an airplane seat, I downloaded the "Diagonal Walking Challenge" game from my mental App Store, and began to play it - 20 meters ahead a vertical vegetation was spotted, and at the 50-meter mark a slope appeared too steep to traverse. I was even playing in multiplayer mode, where the other players were not as skillful as I was. I secretly gloated at such a distinguished honor. But like any game downloaded from the App Store, that game became old so fast that I had to search for a new game to download.

When I reached the class, I had not downloaded another game. The Moonlight Sonata was not playing in the background; I was not writing a book; Berlin was not suffering from terrorist attack; the Wall Street was not melting; many people were starting to have an unimaginably good love affair; many people were not; the bookcase in my old apartment was sitting right next to the wall; a woman was giving birth; another woman was being born; Petr was still afraid of his wife; and I was somewhere on a planet circling a star, doing presentation.

15 hours later, when the planet has finished another 0.625 cycle of rotation, I'm going back to sleep.

2/14

Today in the early afternoon I was caught in a stupor - one of those moments when I cease to be motivated by the common range of things yet couldn't really figure out what I would do otherwise. It wasn't, though, that I have finished all of my presentations and accorded my duty as a student - I was simply too absent-minded to play along with them as I often do.

The sun outside was blazingly white (when I'm writing this it occurs to me that I'd like to mention the sun quite routinely and each time in a different shadow), so were the grass, the trees, and the buildings. Most of the people I still knew were probably all having classes, and I stood alone in my room, amongst a pair of sunglasses, a noodle bowl, and a spoon. Sartre said, "I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these characters spend their time explaining themselves, and happily recognizing that they hold the same opinions. Good God, how important they consider it to think the same things all together." Though I was surrounded with neither voices nor characters, in a sense I felt the same as he did - all of these familiar beautiful things around me, and the way the sunlight was casted upon them created a sense of togetherness that I was not in. After all, I thought to myself, it was a wintry Monday afternoon, and I was a young lad at the university. Perhaps I should dumb down slightly and try to blend in with nature. Hence, with a pair of sunglasses hastily placed on my face and a book in my hand, I dashed out of the room like a naked man dashing out of the sauna - I decided to go to Bremerhaven - there's a wonderful beach where I used to chug around, and if there's anything that Bremen could offer yet Berlin couldn't, it should be a beach with seagulls.

Like any story about a journey that I would tell, I had myself transported in various trains, buses and escalators and reached the town in under two hours. Even though I was then almost 30 miles away from the university, my actual walking distance was about thrice of that from Nordmetall to C3. I wasn't therefore tired - I was merely a bit eager and unsure. Like trying to date with a woman who's chubbier and stupider than I thought, I arrived in Bremerhaven a bit underwhelmed but was anyways eager to enjoy it to a fuller extent. I passed by various shops like Karstadt and Mai Mai, the latter of which somehow triggered my appetite, almost running down the whole trip to a lunch break, emerged from the revolving door and sat on the bench away from the teenagers blasting German hip-hop music and in front of the ocean, while my buttocks spread like they did on the black cushion chair back in college. I took off the sunglasses, and exhaled fully like an upcoming gangbang member waiting on the sofa, but of course, without cigarettes, beer, and any other participant. I fidgeted, swirled, smiled, and then abruptly stopped smiling when a seagull was caught flying mid-air by the violent wind - its face was at first bewildered, but quickly turned aghast when it began to fly backwards. I had the brief intent to laugh, but ended up only twisting my mouth with a certain gentlemanly restraint. I realized that I shared some similarities with the seagull - we saw the same scenery, breathed in the same oxygen, and waddled in the same organismic packages in pursuit of the right feelings, the only difference being that the seagull waved its wings with a vehemency and sincerity that was impossible in my own sore, unmovable ass.

I shuffled through a few pages in my book on philosophy, barely registering a thing, and looked up to the horizon, perhaps, I thought, some of these days, I would remember this. For longer than I would prefer, my catchphrase had been "fuck it", so long, as a matter of fact, that I had forged a label "fuckitism" for the convenience of referring to such an attitude. I left the bench with an adverb that I could only write as "fuckitistically" - correct, I then left the bench fuckitistically as the teenagers listened to the same song, or a different one with the same uncomprehending swagger. The landscape of Bremerhaven had dimmed a little bit but contained largely the same things.

I boarded the train back to the university without the capriciousness when I started out. It was with what that I came back I couldn't exactly pinpoint - it was the feeling of having the primary and secondary senses met, yet the tertiary rebuked. I came back confounded with thoughts but none of them valid enough to nudge my consciousness. I walked automatically, found automatically my semester ticket in the pocket, and gazed automatically at the tree. I was perhaps happier? Perhaps the trip had from some angle validated a portion of my existence where it had not been? It was like drinking orange juice after refusing to order drink at a salty Chinese restaurant? It was like playing basketball after work while thinking about astrophysics? I didn't know the answer to any of these questions. I didn't even know what is a question and why would I have it.

Meanwhile, the teenagers have perhaps returned to their home; the sun has begun to shine several timezones behind mine; the students have stopped having classes and started to sleep; I have stopped writing and started to sleep.

Tomorrow, though, tomorrow, as I remembered dearly, the grasses are green.

2/8

It's been a week back from Berlin, and rarely have I the tenacity of writing down something. Usually around February and March my literary urge would be resuscitated, my words would sprout into a semblance of a tree. But I must admit with a forthright countenance that this year it could be different. Maybe it's Sartre, or Andrew O'Hagan, or some other gentlemen who unsettled me with their words, whatever I intend to write seem to induce a level of sardonic smirk, a signal for the ostensible inanities of, and especially of, my work.

Never mind, I should be used to this by now - especially in this university, one has to have quite some finesse in adaptability in order to cope with the cuisine offered at the cafeteria. Rather than food people would normally envision, the food here is tilted towards an abstraction. Say, an impressionist artist from the renaissance period conjectures up a painting of a plate of sausage spaghettis - the food here is quite like that, a mashed hodgepodge of likely edible things, mixed together with bold color and salt. One could only enjoy it on an intellectual level. And almost with an Orwellian touch, the students come by periodically to obtain their food like museum-goers attend to art. And I am really the exemplary pragmatist in this respect. I would picture a post-apocalyptic world, where humanities are reduced to a single spaceship heading towards another star system, where food is scarce and portioned, and only the aristocrats, or "Jacobanites", are endowed with the privilege of daily natural food. Thematically it fits well, and I just deem myself a particularly picky aristocrat.

In Berlin though, one need invoke neither an intellectual traverse, nor an a priori apocalypse; one simply chooses between Foodora and Deliveroo.

But the subsistence of food aside, the room I have now been allocated, after multiple back-and-forth emails, is spacious and outfitted with a range of amenities akin to those of a proper hotel room. I have even avoided having to bear with a roommate. If in Berlin I had a vague hope of what my life back in the university should look like, it's quite close to what I indeed manage to have, even though there isn't a U2 line at the front door. I have even retrieved my old circle, itself greatly dwindled, and picked up a new habit of having a pot of tea with Owen and a pot of stir-fried tomato egg with Franklin.

I tend to have a complicated relationship with my friends. On one side, it is human nature that my earthly companionship serves as a weight to keep me grounded, so that, for example, when I was having my 22nd birthday, I would convince myself to forage for some kind of a cake. On the other hand, as they have always been, friends are like the various landscapes seen through the cabin window - always appear the same and change only slightly, until the train reaches a city, or I have to get up to pee. The whole intricate and grandiose construct of sociability is so invincible, of course, unless, I find a job elsewhere, or a romantic relationship, or there has been a looming mid-term exam.

Before departing every station, the computerized voice at the BVG subway would announce "zurückbleiben bitte" - one would not mistake it for friendliness; but if a lady tells me to do the same, I would appreciate that with a humanly smile; if she tells me the same thing but in a different way every stop along the line, I might try to strike up a conversation; if she happens to have an attractive physique, and that she tells me the similar things even after I got off the train, like "be careful, it is slippery outside", I might propose to have a cup of coffee with her. This, of course, is only fantasy. But the same useless repetition, when carried out more artfully, becomes the corner stone of a friendship. In a sense, I believe, we secretly yearn to be taken as idiots.

Mind is an incredibly tenuous thing; heart is no less tenuous; however, it is more visceral, therefore more in accordance with our nature - childlike hairless little bipeds, who'd like to scratch their heads, build little things, cultivate a few offsprings and die.

Sartre's view is incomplete from this point of view. The world is existential, but our lives are not. Our lives are animalistic, veiled by varying degrees of eloquence, righteousness, and delusion.