There’s a dull ache in my left hand. Could be the watch band, pulled too tight. Could be time.
It had been four months since I last wrote anything long. I thought about posting something many times. I’d sit down, open a blank page, and then lose interest. Some things seem interesting in my head, but once I turn them over a few times they feel pretty ordinary. That doesn’t mean ordinary things aren’t worth writing down. Some summaries are valuable; if you don’t record them, you forget. So I mostly used short updates: text, photos, a song. Still a kind of record.
On the 28th I finished my last final. That noon I went out and got a perm. In the afternoon I started a device-assembly practicum. It lasted two and a half days. Everyone had something to do, and it was genuinely fun—one of those team projects worth remembering.
Today I finished the PPT for the practicum defense in the morning and had nothing else scheduled. In the afternoon I played Apex with a friend for a few hours and won two rounds. After that, the game stopped feeling interesting. I was just suddenly free. At night I opened the admin page I hadn’t touched in ages and started typing.
The end of term was too busy. All important major courses. Review, labs—there was even a lab in week 16—lab reports, and plenty of pointless stuff that ate time. For instance, a course called Introduction to Communications. We had to keep a notebook for in-person lectures, and on top of that find online lessons and take separate notes. Notes themselves aren’t a problem. The course is closer to humanities, lots to memorize. But it’s a big class: two sections, 120-something students, and everyone was competing. People filled two notebooks. One person did three. It was copying without thinking, page after page, for volume. It didn’t matter what was written. More was better. I found it depressing. I wrote about a dozen pages. Partly lazy, partly because there were only so many key points. Extra filler is meaningless when it won’t be on the exam. When I handed it in I worried my note grade would be low. In the end I was one point below the people with two notebooks. I laughed.
Then lab reports. Our program applied for professional accreditation this year, so every assignment can be spot-checked, lab reports included. Every page has to be full. That annoyed me, so I spent 400 yuan on a handwriting robot. My plan: use it for my own reports, maybe take commissions, sell it before graduation, and not lose money. When it arrived I realized it was the machine I’d dreamed of as a kid—something that would do my homework for me. You set a page template, paste the text into the software, and it writes. It uses ordinary pens; you clamp one in. There are many fonts, and you can even input your own handwriting, but that requires building a character library. I didn’t have time. It wrote more than a dozen reports for me and a few for classmates. While other people stayed up writing, I went to bed early. I had extra time to sit and stare at the wall, which felt more meaningful than copying. Thanks to the people who invent this stuff. Great work.
Finals week was irritating. Hard major courses, labs, and I wanted time to review. There’s a video that captures that mood almost too well: “Exam Week Breakdown — 4K Remastered.”
That’s about all. Below is something I scribbled in my notes earlier.
This semester went fast. Every day, evening arrived before I noticed. Was I that busy? Or was it just inefficient, so I felt like I did nothing and the day was gone? I thought about it, and what I kept coming back to was expectation. I always have some expected event hanging in front of me. Sometimes I create it; mostly it is attached to me from outside—though that is also a result of my own choices. Which classes are on which days, when an assignment is due, how long the semester runs, the date of finals, the next holiday, how long until the next break. If ordinary days are ordinary, these supposedly special days feel special because there are things we have to do. Many things are already waiting for you before they happen. When the day arrives, you do the thing that belongs to it. Once it’s done, in a sense, the day is over. Subtract eating, sleeping, walking, small daily tasks, dawdling, and not much of the 24 hours is left. Then it’s evening. You sigh that the days go by so fast, go to bed, and welcome the next one. Repeat. Earth’s rotation hasn’t changed. A day is still 24 hours. We want to keep as much of that limited time as possible for ourselves, for what we actually want to do. During the day we run around, so we leave that important task for night.
“The night is quiet, but I am not willing to let today go. So I pick up my phone and borrow from tomorrow.”
