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. 

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, 

Today two sets of parents have brought their college-aged kids to my home to ask me the million-dollar golden question of “How do you learn English”. 

One is a boy just out of high school and going to college this September. Once the door shut his dad and my dad out of earshot and sight, he jumped onto my beloved one-man sofa like he’s jumped onto it for a millionth time already and started chatting about all the funny pranks his classmates and he pulled on the principal and teachers of his high school. I probably enjoyed them a little bit too much because although we go to the same high school, several years’ gap apparently could produce a new evil generation of students that could raise hell like no one. Compared to them my generation were like permissive slaves to the all powerful whip-wielding teachers/masters. All their graffitiing teacher’s names and rude words onto school walls and crashing the PE teacher’s crotch into the door frame in the made-up game of “airplane” are to me perhaps some healthy release for all the bitterness pent up and strategically stacked away all the three years.

Obviously we didn’t talk much about learning English, and that boy isn’t really smart in many aspects, but he means what he says and has a vision for things he’s really interested in, like raising fish. What struck me most is his sheer optimism out of nothing: a third-rate obscure university is in his words nonetheless “the impending golden gate to a bright future”. That combined with all their funny pranks in and out of class struck me as something the resembles a life that I would have wanted and loved to live during my school years but were too scared of trailing off the golden path of a good student (and perhaps a decent professional career) to even try for one day, until the point that I am physically and mentally incapable of that kind of life anymore. But somehow through his chatting and laughing it was kindled again, but this time it seems all that remains in me is some melancholy sighs at the life that could have been, too wild a dream to ever live but only fondly entertain. 

The other one who comes to me is a parent - the girl, whom I’ve known since I was little, is too shy to come. I talk to her about exactly what she asked and gradually become a little complacent in my own minuscule authority over the matter. After a while I see myself turning into one of those people that I hate - ego profiting from the so-called “IQ gap”, like the less stupid leading the stupid. And then my complacency is put off, to my delight and relieve. I’m never going to become one of those pumped-up “savants” blinded by their lesser ignorance over the many’s general ignorance. I’m going to be Socrates that knows nothing much all the way.  

Last week I sent in my first email as a listener to my favorite podcast Too Beautiful to Live (abbreviated as ‘TBTL’. If anyone happens to be reading this, go check it out. It’s meta). Each week they have this listener mail time where, as the name suggests, they go over some of the emails submitted by listeners that are in any way relavent to the show, and the cool thing is today they read mine!

The email is as follows:

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I am writing because over the past few days I’ve discovered a new use for Rebecca Black’s “Friday” as a day planner and procrastination stopper. 

I know you have said on the show multiple times how you hate the narrative style of songwriting by Katy Perry and how “Friday” is guilty of the same thing, but it can become the perfect style of choice when you want to stop loitering around put your to-do list into action. For example, when I was procrastinating my time away this morning reading news of train crashes, passengers trapped in burning buses and gun shootings instead of doing my boring intern work at home, a good and helpful tune to stop this would be to take the music of “Friday”- for me the part that works the best is  ”Kicking in the front seat, kicking in the back seat…everybody’s looking forward to the weekend” - and put in the to-do items: “buy buy buy buy buy lunch, e-e-e-e-eat lunch, [I somehow shudder at the thought of inserting “fun fun fun” into the mix], then I am going back to wooork”. 

I think the magic to it in stopping procrastination is that it eliminates the intimidation of the pile of work that tends to be messy and orderless and gives it order plus a somewhat childishly positive spin by packaging it into a (however badly) regulated musical form, which says “control”.  Haven’t thought about how a longer list would fit into the song or any other songs yet, but am definitely going to try. 

This is by all means one of the coolest moments of my life so far, but having my writing vocalized out loud has alerted me to one big problem of my writing: I simply use too many long sentences that make comprehension just a little bit too cumbersome and thus making my reading a bit unpleasant to read. The dear co-host of the show Jen actually stumbles at the part where I talk about what I am loitering around about and the subsequent part about how I used the song as a procrastination stopper, which certainly I would rather not happen in one of my happiest moments.

My professors have commented several times in my essays about this problem, which I regret to say that I’ve all brushed aside in my mind. But having some of my favourite people pointing this out to me certainly is weighing on me and I’m as of this moment determined to have more clarity, shorter sentences, and less digression in my future writings. 

Proud to be a ten.

Recent events in my life have propelled me to ponder a very tricky question in the shaping of my person: is it the time in my life where I stop picking bits and pieces from the experiences of others in a hope of morphing the best of them into what is supposedly the ultimate bestest-of-the-best version that is my supposedly ‘idealized self’, and actually start pruning those various strands of personalities, dispositions, tastes and ambitions on the basis of my feeble yet apparently existent and emerging sense of self, including my own taste and my own preference. The path of the latter can be a frightening and tentative experience, since invariably my own wicked self is likely to be ill-fitted with the established ‘modes’ and ‘types’ of the world. I think this applies to every individual as well: types is a mere sociological generalization that does not really exist in real life. 

Yesterday I tried the carpe-diem fun-seeking experience and philosophy that young people my age are catching up to and finding fun in: bars at night, house parties where ‘do you like anything to drink’ entails a list of options that prioritizes gin, vodka, rum and beer over water, talks about the general arts: theatre, concerts (both classical music and modern), meeting an upcoming author, going to places in the world. Overall I now think I have hated it, (except for the art-related activities, which inevitably is a taste cultivated not only by a genuine interest but also by money). 

Maybe in that almost instinctive inability to enjoy these fun activities which these peers of mine seem to delight in has emerged my feeble yet distinct sense of a self. If there is a mental portrait of myself, the rough strokes would probably tell that at the age of 21 I:

• don’t get the idea of staying up for partying and consuming alcohol
• consider it strange and slightly sinful that people my age should take for granted the use of alcohols as a means to have fun (actually I do not think they had fun, given the 3-in-the-morning nausea and mental strain) and make a show that they’ve been good friends with alcohol since their birth - I will have beer and the occasional drinks with people that I really like, but I do not see it as a necessary agent in having fun. Alcohol is peripheral. 
• appreciate the arts tremendously (but reget not having invested enough time at effort in it).
• appreciate distinct personal opinions on things and am trying to develop a more pronounced individual voice.
• admire people who have their own niche interest and pursuits.
• like studying, improving the related skills in studying and especially thinking, figuring out why E=MC2, the cognitive benefit of game playing, the psychological and philosophical patterns hidden behind the daily use of languages. Good times for me are the times where I spend exploring ideas and discussing these things over with like-minded people. Over a couple of beers, fine, not drinking vodka till a round of card-playing starts becoming fun. 

I may be a nerd but I fucking like it. Only in this way of life do I find my life not wasted.