a string of bells一掣现在的铃……

自省

1. 不因为不在乎我的人生气；

2. 不对对我虚情假意的人动真情（男女不限）；

3. 小朋友，GROW UP吧！（对有些莫名其妙的同学，只要这句就够了，小米要淡定淡定……）

4. 鄙视口是心非八面玲珑背后捅刀的人：戴面具的同学，衷心希望你早日摘掉面具，戴着面具憋得慌吧，外面空气很新鲜哦~

5. 将学术进行到底：鄙视低俗，鄙视忽悠；

6. 爱我的爸爸妈妈，爱LG，爱我的好朋友们；

7. 乐活/轻食/运动；进了蛋糕店也不买甜点；慢慢少喝酒；

8. 慢慢做回那个敢做敢想敢拼的小米！学习！

9. captivity of negativity？一定跟我无关！

10. 多做自省。。。。。。

在最近上课过程中突然又有了很多灵感，于是挤出时间死命做到PPT里去，迫不及待地想要告诉我的学生，想要让他们在马上要到的考试里能用上。一边做，一边眼睛累得要冒火，还是急冲冲地停不下来。回过神来发现，哦，这就是我在NOS最后2节课了。突然有种临XX言的感觉。原来，属于我的end of an era也到了。

在这个结点，心里当然很是复杂。甜蜜、喜悦、自豪、骄傲；痛苦、疲惫、焦虑，每个字背后都是一串我努力走过的脚印，每个一脚印里，都有我的汗水和泪水，又岂是几句话可以描述清楚的。一切结束时故作的云淡风轻，对不起历历在目的过往。所以，就让它们留在回忆里吧。

给与我一起并肩走过的战友和同学们：

I pray that all the dreams you dream come true

And every star you wish upon

Grant every wish times two

I hope one day you’ll get the chance to truly see

What real love is

Like you’ve shown me.

 

This afternoon while I was reading, I suddenly remembered two very small discs and wondered about their whereabouts. So I went through a few cabinets and the least attended drawers, but the two little monsters still refused to show up, making a mockery of my messy lifestyle. Soon the casual whimsical search turned into a sick “disc obsession” and then a search mania which began to take on a life of its own and went totally out of control.

 

The drawers were so full that they seemed like they were going to puke, owing to my habit of tossing absent-mindedly into the closest drawer something I no longer need but still haven’t decided to throw away. Thirty minutes later the two discs were still nowhere to be found but I was lost in the process. Every once in a while, I stopped to take a long look at the pieces of paper, weathered and shabby, and though I could only vaguely remember why I kept them, I could vividly recall how much I treasured them.

 

And then, stacked at the bottom of the drawer, the old letters were excavated. These weren’t just letters; they were the carrier of the unbearable memories. The memories they carry were always lurking in a certain corner of my heart for sure, but meeting face-to-face with them gave a sting to my senses. As I slowly unfolded the letters, eyes following those familiar hand-writings, I was dragged all the way back to the past, to a time when the pains in my heart were inflicted and the scars still make me flinch and wince to this day.

 

Time. Four letters, one big word. So big that it can wrinkle your love-letters as well as your forehead; yet ironically it can also alleviate the pain in your life which used to seem so intensive that it can hinder your heart from functioning normally. It also makes it a whole lot easier to let go of things you so stubbornly hold on to and keep using them to punish yourself. But there are things that are so scrappy that they can survive both time and numerous cleaning-ups of the drawers. The broken pencil-sharpener or the chocolate wrappers (yes, I was crazy about keeping useless stuff) may finally be hurtling down the garbage chute, but my memories never.

 

One and a half hours later, I finally threw in the towel and sat myself down at the table. Wandering inadvertently down the memory lane seemed painful indeed, but at the very least, there was more room in my drawers now, waiting to be filled up by new memories.

My girl friend finally took the step and broke up with the man known as a scumbag. I understand that no matter how tough she may seem and how casual and relieved she may sound telling the story, it is never easy to face the end of an era, even when it may well have been the end of an error.

Relationship. It’s hard enough for two people not even remotely related to communicate with each other and with all the strings attached, the delicate shift of power, the uncertain and sometimes gloomy prospect, one can only imagine how many times harder it is to be in a relationship. If one is supposed to meet only one other person in the boundless continuum of time and space, if one is destined to be with only one soul mate throughout one’s entire course of life, then how can you tell if it is only a skirmish or a full-scale war a.k.a the end of the relationship when you two go into a fight? While we admit that the onlookers always know better, we still hear only what we what to hear and believe what we want to believe, screening anything that doesn’t fit in our pretty little fantasy relationship. When a tiff occurs, do you write it off as your partner’s characteristic flaw or do you secretly harbor the idea that maybe it is the foreboder of the ultimate doomsday of your relationship?

Human beings are obsessed with weighing the pros and cons, hence the sadistic questions such as “is it better to marry someone who loves you more than you love him/her?” But it has now dawned on me that human beings have this craving for danger, beauty and mystery, which simply defies any attempt to suppress it. One need look no further than the very corny, cliché-ized love affair between the moth and the fire to see a case in point. The same is also true with beautiful slim girls’ tug-of-war with fattening yet alluring disserts and the wandering eyes of man on a beautiful mysterious woman, the latter being so commonplace that it has almost been deemed normal of a man.

The sad truth is that one has only got one shot in this big drama called life: no audition, no rehearsal, and definitely no start-over-yet-again. You trip on the stage and your pain is out in the open right then, right there with everybody else to witness. You are very careful with your steps and sometimes you wonder if other moves or twirling might look more fabulous but hell, how can you tell if you haven’t tried? And even if you have, how do you know they are actually better than the original moves you have had in mind? Just like the two roads in the wood: even if the one we pick is flanked with hawthorns and monsters whilst we hear heart-felt laughter from the other one and see rosy canopy over it, we can only march on with our faith in the choice we make and in the future we are about to encounter.

A little poem to share with you, my friends.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

 

Harry: You realize of course that we can never be friends.

Sally: Why not?

Harry: What I'm saying is... and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form, is that men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

Sally: That's not true, I have a number of men friends and there's is no sex involved.

Harry: No you don't.

Sally: Yes I do.

Harry: No you don't.

Sally: Yes I do.

Harry: You only think you do.

Sally: You're saying I'm having sex with these men without my knowledge?

Harry: No, what I'm saying is they all want to have sex with you.

Sally: They do not.

Harry: Do too.

Sally: They do not.

Harry: Do too.

Sally: How do you know?

Harry: Because no man can be friends with a woman he finds attractive, he always wants to have sex with her.

Sally: So you're saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive.

Harry: Nuh, you pretty much wanna nail'em too.

Sally: What if they don't want to have sex with you?

Harry: Doesn't matter, because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.

Sally: Well I guess we're not going to be friends then.

Harry: Guess not.

 

Harry: No no no no, I never said that.  (Harry pauses, thinks.)  Yes, that's right, they can't be friends.  Unless both of them are involved with other people then they can.  This is an amendment to the earlier rule,if the two people are in relationships, the pressure of possibility of involvement is lifted.  (Pauses) That doesn't work either because what happens then is the person you're involved with can't understand why you need to be friends with the person you're just friends with.  Like it means something is missing from their relationship and "why do you have to go outside to get it?". Then when you say, "no no no no, it's not true nothing's missing from the relationship", the person you're involved with then accuses you of being secretly attracted to the person you're just friends with, which we probably are, I mean, come on, who the hell are we kidding, let's face it, which brings us back to the earlier rule before the amendment which is men and women can't be friends, so where does that leave us?

 

Woman, how on earth will you be able to see when enough is enough?

She seems to have had it all—a man she loves who is more than willing to love her back; a man in the past who borders on being deadly charming, which, by the way, totally fits a Scorpio; a man who has been there for her most pathetic and bitchy outbursts but still remains to be the person that is just inseparable from her life. But still, she looks at the three of them with a sigh, not out of content, but out of the deepest regrets.

When we were little girls with ponytails flapping high in the air while we ran on and on like the summer would never end, we had already fashioned a million times our future Prince Charming after a certain fantasy: he might be tall, dark, handsome (needless to say); sweet, smart, and funny; confident but not too full of himself; kind and polite to everyone in the room but his sparkling eyes always, always lightening up just for me.

With the elapse of time and the lash of reality, we somehow make peace with the crude and plain fact: Prince Charming? It ain’t gonna happen! Lucky one sees her fantasy dissolving into different characters, each filling one of her many needs. Others, not so lucky, but all the more stubborn, simply refuse to compromise; they either stop looking and settle for someone who is dull and maybe even bald but just loves her dearly or keep up with this lonely and fruitless search.

Sometimes I feel like we are all in dire need of some kind of special ALL-IN-ONE shampoo: get one bottle home and all your needs are met. Yeah, in a perfect world, we do. But this world, no kidding, is far from being perfect. So that’s why we get one bottle of shampoo with another bottle of conditioner. More importantly, we shuffle the brand-names so that we will be guaranteed to extract different ingredients to make the lustrous, wavy, and cascading hair we want others to see.

Life is all about compromises, eh?

The plot of the book Message in a Bottle is, well, predictable. Half way into it, you can clearly figure out the ending of the story: in this long-distance relationship, where the heroine has “just” worked her way into a “booming” career in a metropolis and her son just “loves” the school there, and the hero, a man who grows up on a beach, finds himself “lost” in the modern jungle, what are you gonna do about their heart-sundering, soul-shaking love? Make him die! Man! It must be easy to be a writer from time to time and all the pieces in life will fall right into place. (PS: does the writer have kind of a male-phobic complex or something? The hero of another book of his, also alarmingly charming, loving and caring—in a word, seemingly perfect—dies a violent death. )

 

The choice of word is, if not disappointing, mediocre at best. In a supposedly romantic novel, I find the repeated appearances of the word adrenaline quite out of place. And here is the list of words that I have jotted down while reading. Hope it could be of use to people who want to learn something and wish to avoid wasting time going through a whole book.

[svelte, voyeur(which is by the way really odd given the context it was in), autistic, parlay, woozy, frazzle, frolic, primp, broach]

 

This book is perfect for someone who is just looking for an easy reading. You can finish your book in one sitting, two at the most, with even a bag of crisps in your lap. Although it promises to be very moving, you will not be moved to get a box of tissue. (When the father of the hero calls the heroine in a dismal and grim voice, you know exactly what has happened.)That I can guarantee.

 

They say poetry is a matter of words and people reveal their desire for and fear of chaos in poems. The rule should be applied to any genre of literature. The desire for chaos is the breath of literature; the fear of chaos is in their parade of forms and technique. So in a very conventional layout of a romantic story, a voice from the bottom of our heart is still crying out for twists and turns of events that will make it almost painful to put the book down. And when that happens, you will know you are reading a great  book.

Like Virginia with her Mrs. Dalloway, she has found her own very first sentence. She thought.

While sharing with her students the story of Nie, her Japanese teacher who was the sole force pushing her forward to chase her dream, she felt tears welling up in her eyes. After so many years, after a blank of any communication between them, that such a tiny episode way back in her life still managed to set her memories in motion reaffirmed what had been on her mind for quite some time: EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON.

With or without our knowledge, our past, every teeny-tiny bit of it, is programmed into our present existence like an indecipherable code which simply can’t be scratched off no matter how much we try. Just like her father’s walking out on her and her mother, like the deep affections between her and Sam, so sweet at first and then inevitably sour and bitter, like the very casual, harmless conversation which was to bring her her husband. Everything happens for a reason, either as a test or a pavement leading to where we are now. We simply can’t fight destiny.

All this was in her head when she rode home after 12 hours’ work. At a crossroads, she stopped and not for the first time in her life, she found her soul floating off her body, looking at the whole world as if nothing could concern her even a bit, as if there were nothing she could relate to—in a word, she didn’t belong here. If she had a choice, she would like to take off and never look back at this world again, leaving those mundane, depressing, heart-sundering incidents to this world and to those who embrace the world like they are embracing sunshine. And, right at that moment, her earphone was singing “Nothing is bigger than love”. Honestly, she doesn’t usually buy crap like this. But maybe, there’s after all a flickering ray of hope deep down in her heart telling her to hold on to the belief, to the real world. And at that point, she felt her feet on the ground again—the threads of hope and warmth, no matter how feeble and fragile, finally managed to hold her back.

Yes, EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON.

 

(TO BE CONTINUED)

对于某件事，我决定暂时按下不表，我忍。

这个世界从来就不公平。所以，何必庸人自扰。

It started out as a feeling
Which then grew into a hope
Which then turned into a quiet thought
Which then turned into a quiet word
And then that word grew louder and louder
‘Til it was a battle cry
I’ll come back
When you call me
No need to say goodbye
Just because everything’s changing
Doesn’t mean it’s never been this way before
All you can do is try to know who your friends are
As you head off to the war
Pick a star on the dark horizon
And follow the light
I’ll come back when it’s over
No need to say goodbye
I’ll come back when it’s over
No need to say goodbye
Now we’re back to the beginning
It’s just a feeling and no one knows yet
But just because they can’t feel it too
Doesn’t mean that you have to forget
Let your memories grow stronger and stronger
‘Til they’re before your eyes
I’ll cone back
When they call me
No need to say goodbye
I’ll come back
When they call me
No need to say goodbye

 

To y'all, my dearest friends.