A Wish

The third day in the Chinese Lunar New Year vacation. Almost feel, or smell, the ending flavor of the holidays. In a way, it should be true thus.

Two or three days later, I’ll be thrown back into a hell where I’ve already been for over a week before the holidays. A paper to complete and not yet so. After the holidays, I got only 7 days at most to devote myself to the work. Yet the real working time, to my best measurement, will be only 4 or 5 days. I can imagine how hard and hellish those days will look like, the thought of which seriously darkens the tinge of vacation happiness.

If being asked of the wish in the new year, I would reply: more hours to be used for one day, and better quality of sleep for the whole year. Simply hope I could act, think, and live in a calm and composed manner to confront all the challenges in the days to come. That demeanor, to my belief, will be utterly important in using the meager time in the best way possible.

So help me, God.

Get Stuck

Get stuck in the middle of a working paper. It should’ve been done by the end of the last year. Yet the new year still starts with an unfinished paper. Feel quite anxious and a bit depressed. The good thing, though, is that I’m getting more clear about the topical focus and the way to trim the paper length. I only hope that by finishing the paper, I would learn more in both thinking and writing than before. Otherwise I really don’t know how to go on to do it.

Recently, I fall into a status of grave dissatisfaction about my own research. It should be time for breaking free from the phantom in the past and breaking a new ground for the future. Yes, the future. I’m waiting for a future that is not only redeemable, but able to redeem my past.

N's learning

How to set a goal for N’s learning? What does it mean by learning? Is it to learn simply to become one of various techniques, to become oneself more like a technician, in the broad sense of the word, than like one who knows how to think and what to think of? Does learning a foreign language, for example, mean to master oneself a tool, a linguistic instrument, to communicate, more often than not, all that is trivial and redundant and to show oneself off, to mark oneself different in skin-deep vanity, or should it be tended towards more profound understanding and love of the culture underlying that language to give it its very life?

Too many questions left unanswered, yet to be the food of thought. It’s time to think this over for better involving myself in N’s learning at home.