Preface
This week I took my time finishing Calvino’s Marcovaldo. I came away in awe of the author’s imagination and the sheer descriptive force of his writing — he seems to have constructed an entirely separate, full-color world inside his head that no one else has access to. Marvelous, really. By the end I felt like everything had been reduced to a blank page. Marcovaldo is a city laborer with a romantic streak, observing his neighborhood with sharp eyes. Through his vision the gray, threadbare life around him becomes interesting. And just when you’ve decided he’s a pure romantic, Calvino throws in a twist and lets Marcovaldo tumble back into the vulgar and mundane. Vulgar and luminous can exist in the same person at once. The dark humor of the writing kept making me laugh and grimace at the same time.
The sun is hitting the window just right now. I’m listening to my playlist and slowly tapping out what amounts to the kind of weekly log that grade-school teachers used to assign every week — half marveling at my own taste in music, half writing. Every time I look up out the window I see the big tree next to the building not far off. That tree was like a guardian deity shielding the houses on either side, and it quietly vanished last winter. Like one day I woke up and it was just gone. This week, coming back to my little rented room, I was startled by how gray and colorless the view outside had become — and then it hit me: that tree’s been gone for a while now.
This week I went through several videos by a YouTuber I’d liked a lot in college, James Scholz. It’s already been four years since I first saw one of his videos — basically the blink of an eye and several years are gone. In his latest upload I was amazed to see he’s trying out acting and went to London to shoot a film — it’s so cool!! After graduating from college he road-tripped halfway around the US, and he’s also been building an app with another YouTuber. I also dug up an old post of mine that I’d written under his influence to motivate myself:
So really it’s all about journey rather than the destination. I kind of wish I’d enjoyed myself along the way.
Learning Notes
Studying really does not respond to impatience — you can’t blow on hot tofu to cool it. I have to slow down. I’m seriously rushing. I don’t even know what the parts are and I’m trying to build a plane. I haven’t studied a lick of JavaScript and I’m trying to build an interactive site. AI tools nowadays are unbelievably useful, but I always feel like if I just take the ready-made answer without thinking, my brain will get dumber. This week I tried out Cursor — it is insanely powerful. Just hit Tab, Tab and the code autocompletes; it guesses what you’re about to write next. AI is moving stupidly fast. I still remember the winter of 2022 when ChatGPT suddenly appeared, and the shock of using it to solve algorithm problems.
I also sent out a handful of résumés. Meanwhile I’m practicing HTML & CSS and trying to make an online alarm-clock web page. Since I don’t really know JavaScript, it’s pretty rough going. My CSS is also rusty — back in college I just couldn’t figure out CSS, it didn’t seem to follow any logic and I couldn’t memorize all those properties. Looks like I’m running into the same problem now 😅.
In an Overcast Sky, the Scent of Osmanthus
One cold February afternoon, while my sister and I were out walking, the sky was wrapped in mist. I caught a floral scent before I could see anything, and asked her what flower it was. A few steps further on, I saw the osmanthus trees along the asphalt path, dotted with their tiny cream-yellow blossoms. Not as full as September’s osmanthus, but giving off a faint sweetness.
The following section was written on 2025/02/13:
Chronic procrastinator’s laziness disease flared up — I dragged my feet, and then dragged some more. The last two days I haven’t really read or listened to podcasts. On the 8th I met a friend for a meal and we caught up. Honestly, I’ve never really known what I want. I keep trying to untangle the thoughts in my head, but it’s too chaotic, so I just take whatever life hands me as it arrives. While we were chatting, she asked me: Okay, flip it around — what do you hate*?* The list of things I hate is too long to get into in a sentence or two.
Maybe I should get out and travel — finally do the wandering trip I’d been talking about in 2022. Smell tree leaves and flowers in the wild, see what I encounter on the road, see what catches my eye.
The Pursuit of Happiness Is a False Premise
The older I get, the less obsessive I am about pursuing happiness. What I care about more is pursuing inner stillness — being alone, spacing out, evicting every worry from my head. When I was little I thought our tiny village was the entire world, because in the village you could play every game there was: jumping rope, throwing beanbags, hopscotch, catching tadpoles down at the river in summer and raising them into frogs. Those tadpoles only ever lived for one summer though — by the time the summer holiday ended, the ones that had grown limbs would slowly stop swimming and float listlessly on the surface. We’d go on expeditions across the riverbed, scavenge through abandoned houses, dig up stamps issued back in the last century. Back then my understanding of the wider world stopped at textbooks and TV — anywhere beyond the little county was “far away.” But the freedom and joy were unmatched. As an adult my mind keeps getting stuffed with stuff: anxiety, fear, desires beyond my capacity, filling my head to the brim. Once in a while I have to do some subtraction. When the inside goes still, happiness comes more easily.
Thinking back, I had a pretty good childhood in the village, actually. Whatever I wanted to learn, I’d watch and then try, and then I had it. I was being pushed forward by an unrelenting sense of crisis that surfaced in middle school, sure, but I really do miss the version of me from back then — alive, full of an unshakable conviction that if I want to do this, I can do it. I’ve apparently always been too independent — it just struck me that I even learned to ride a bike on my own. Under one meter thirty tall, dragging out an adult-sized bicycle, I practiced one afternoon and got it. The trigger was watching someone ride past my front door one day and getting curious about how they were keeping their balance. Nobody held the bike steady for me — I just got on and worked it out little by little, feeling for it. Back then I had inexhaustible energy. If I wanted to do something, I’d observe and practice and I’d get there. As I’ve grown up, oddly, I’ve become less confident in myself, started hiding myself away, gotten timid. Even my mom has noticed.
People are too complicated. Completely opposite traits can coexist in the same person. If you ask what kind of person I am, I can’t easily slap a label on it. My MBTI is INFP, but I do make plans, I reason rather than going on intuition, and when I’m doing something I actually want to do I don’t procrastinate at all — even though most of the time I’m chaotic and chronically late. Labeling is what you do when you’re cleaning training data — that’s what machine learning algorithms do. If I’m remembering right, it’s been almost three years since I graduated from college. Time moves like a shooting star, gone in a flash, before I even get to make a wish. I’ve apparently never seen a meteor shower in my life. Every time the news announces a once-in-decades meteor shower for some constellation, either I’d run up to the roof with my little brother and see nothing, or I’d go outside on a freezing winter night with friends only to find a wall of smog and not a single visible thing. Achieved precisely nothing — except picking up some bragging skills. :-D