Kept for My Occasional Nostalgia

I think this space of one month deserves its own block of a good sum-up. And since it’s towards the wee hours of the night (actually 1:04 a.m. here), I think I will just do it bulletin-style. 

• I ditched my offer of MA progamme @ the Chinese University of Hong Kong in early January. Although I told everybody, including myself, that the main (and most noble) reason for turning it down was that I felt like before I pursue any further education in any discipline I should go out into the world for a while, live the life of a non-student for a change, and find the real-world significance to whatever I intend to pursue academically, the actual major reason is that my family is too poor to afford the tuition and the living expense in Hong Kong at the moment. So after my BA graduation I am looking at a year of working, which could be exciting for the most part. An apparent upside is I get to spend more time in my home city Xi’an. I just hope life will show me its course after that. 
• I got to meet a German guy from my current Uni through a girl friend from South Korea, and played tour guide when he came to Xi’an for two days during the winter holiday. And man that was really two fun days. We basically walked to every part of the city and saw everything the city has to offer in terms of history, architecture, culture, cuisine and might I say “Chineseness” in the eyes of foreign visitors. But what is the most fun was we got to talk a lot during the sight-seeing, comparing notes about the German and Chinese society and just chit chatting. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t been just a tiny bit enamored - I have actually been cracking up on my old Pimsleur German mp3s ever since he left for other cities in his grand tour. It is just nice to know that he’d still be on campus when the new semester begins in a month, something to look forward to. 
• And sadly with that went all my previous infatuation with this other person. I surly do think back on this with just an appropriate amount of “Quel dommage”. 
• Met up with an old high school friend today at a lovely local Starbucks - the only one in the city, or anywhere, that is decorated in a traditional Chinese style with all the wooden frames and a bar where you get to sit right in front of the working station full of cups and cans. She’s lost the tenseness of her high school days and carries now a quite cosmopolitan air and a far wider outlook, which is really good and reassuring to see, given that I have actually seen her faint in class due to stress. The only thing that bugs me about her is her constant questioning about why I haven’t got a girlfriend yet, or ever. But let’s be honest, this is really not her fault. I only find that prickling apparently because I have got a skeleton in the cupboard while she is free to splay her sexuality right out in the open. (In fact, she has gone so open about it as to exclaiming right in the middle of the street: “oh honey, you can’t just live by wanking all your life”). 
• While I am looking down out of my window at the little street lined on both sides and in the middle with parked cars, and one or two people walking in between like little dots teasing through the lines. I feel strangely reassured and in peace. 

I feel like I am drifting away from my old high school friends and classmates, and I am not feeling as bad or sad as I probably should. 

They are most of them shooting off into the booming economy of the country working for big financial institutions as accountants or investment bankers, while I, along with a few others, go off to be linguists, historians, or theologians specializing in Tibetan Buddhism or History of Western China. Wow, I guess my team sounds way more awesome on paper lol. 

Cheers,

What is there to life anyway? If the validation from the outside world starts crumbling and becomes all of a sudden uncertain, and you thus become even incredulous of who you are and what you are made of? 

Life somehow is subsequently reduced to sex, everything about it. The thought of sex, the visuals, the tentative acts of it on my own body, then suddenly halted because I have simply given it too many a go lately and do not have the “sexiness” in me anymore, and also because of the realization that sex here is simply an escape mechanism. 

Life is certainly not about doing meaningful things at the moment anymore, but rather filling it with tasks and tasks and tasks until the pit is full, but is it ever?

What is there to worry about anyway? Julian Barnes seems to think, as have many great people from the past, that with the thought of death in mind everything’s ultimate significance becomes clearer, and you may well gain a whole different perspective on life. So I am going to do it for a few seconds. 

If I were to die in a few hours…the thought of any MA admission or academic dissertation would be the last thing on my mind. 

Emotion proves to be king, however I try to take it out of the equation of my life ever so often. I’d tell 雷梦轩 that I am somewhere between caring a lot about him and loving him. To everybody else I’d probably have nothing much to say, either ‘cause there isn’t really much to say or because it is quite possibly going to be bluntly hurtful. 

Okay, talking about emotions is not cathartic at all. It is making me shrink back to this small individual instead of expanding me and connecting me to the universe. lol 

What is this thing that we keep grasping in the dirty water of life that we call “meaning”? Is it there in the first place? It is in times like this that I often start questioning it, but really it is just my way of expressing self-disappointment: I may be rejected by CUHK and I dread the thought of it, so in a sense I am shifting the responsibility to the fundamental meaninglessness of human beings’ existence and of life just to make my rejection the universe’s loss instead of my own. 

Wow…this is something that I have never thought of so clearly before. 

The solution part is always the hardest to a piece of analysis. What am I to do?

By predictable logical extension it is easy: just face the music and deal with whatever comes. But apparently in this case, as in many other cases, words far proceed the pace of my mentality. 

In three days I am leaving Xi’an for Beijing as Senior Year of college begins in early September, and once again I am depressed about leaving. 

The pattern is really dead-set and bizarre at the same time: I just hate leaving places, either from Beijing or Xi’an (except for from England I have to say. When I was leaving there I was definitely at least over 40 per cent happy so it wasn’t that bitter). I think the reason is that when I stay in one place for an extended period of time (so far the minimum is 30 days) I got emotionally attached to people in that place and very quickly fit myself into a very snug routine of life there, and when I am leaving,this comfort with the routine is broken and I get depressed. 

But I guess it isn’t hard to see the bright side of it: everywhere I go I am simply going to enjoy and love the place and the people there shortly after I arrive. 

So I think this would be a good time to reflect on my past two weeks of crazy learning of linguistics and how the exam turned out, as well as little things that have surfaced in my consciousness recently. 

The two-week revision period isn’t as butt-clenching-ly intense as I’d imagined. After 3 or 4 days of crashing through the “grammar” section everything else (that includes sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics etc.) felt kind of anecdotal and was thus read more for pleasure than for information. 

The exam turned out kind of a roller-coaster ride. There were 3 parts, the last two of which are all essays and the first consists of three individual questions that I assume is aimed at testing the basic linguistic knowledge and analytical skills, namely figuring out “meaning unit” (lexicon) in a list of words in a foreign language, figuring out the phonological pattern of a foreign language (again from a list of given word) and syntactical comparison between two languages. 

For any sane being it would probably be a stupid act to dawdle for one hour on Part I Question I when the test itself is 2.5 hours, but I don’t know if it’s the weather or if it’s the time of day, that is exactly what I did. That means I have to finish the rest at a relatively paced rushing-thru, which I did until 7 minutes to the end I realized I had forgotten about the last essay question….so even beyond the time limit I just wrote and wrote and wrote without even much thinking going on but the single voice that’s screaming through my hole body that “I’m gonna finish this damn thing”. When I submitted I was 17 minutes overtime. 

Now looking back and writing about the incident only 3 days after it happened I felt like I am writing some other people’s miserable story, and it feels unreal. But I guess that’s the psychological distance that I’ve got to have to actually learn something from it instead of whining tearlessly. 

I think the heart of the problem is that I’m a reader of information but not a fan of practical application. I certainly know all the definitions of the terms and their inter-relatedness. But I only had a somewhat vague and peripheral once-over when it comes to how linguists have utilized that “logicalization” process to arrive at something concrete: namely figuring out the patterns of a foreign language. During the revision period the thought of doing actual real-time analyses of foreign tongues actually occurred to me more than once, and I knew it was quite a vital part of what linguistics entails, but somehow I just let it brush me by because there has been another interesting information to read and synthesize, which I feel more comfortable doing. Well, I guess that never turns out well. 

Now the written exam is over with a phone interview still on the way. I think it would do me good to do a review of my strengths and weaknesses in mental preparations for that, and hopefully I will be able to deliver better stuff. 

Peace,