231 - Forgetting familiar faces

Eleven days ago, my mother flew from Hong Kong to come visit me here in the UK for her Chinese New Year holiday off work. We spent half the time in Canterbury, where my university is located, and the rest of the time in Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands and Londontown. Before the 10th of February, I hadn't seen her for more than 4.5 months, and to be honest, I had sort of forgotten what she looked like in person. Right now, her physical appearance is fresh in my mind as I only saw her off at Heathrow airport last night, but it'll be another four-and-a-half months before I see her again, and I know I will gradually begin to forget her semblance again until the day I embark on that 16-hour journey finally.

Of course we have all this technology that allows us to talk to each other and see each other with the click of a button or two. But it's just not the same, if you get what I'm saying. This experience of moving away from my home in Hong Kong, to a place where I have to pretty much make it on my own in all aspects of my life, scares the living crap out of me all the time, but it has really shown me what fears, discomforts, and individual strength can be brought about inside me by something as simple as geographical distance.

I do have two or three close friends staying here in the UK, who I've known for a long, long time. The more I thought about it on the train back to university from London, the more I realized that I actually forget people's faces and voices very easily with prolonged absence. There are actually many people in my life that I have forgotten the faces of, and the mere voices of. Sure, I know where they go to university now, and sure I hear things about what they're doing. Sure, I talk to them every now and then, and sure we play games online together, and we look at each other's photos, and it's pretty much like spending time together in the flesh...

...but it's not. There really is a difference, one I cannot find the words to explain adequately. It means something to be in one another's physical presence. It means something to hear the sound of their voices, and their distinctive laughs. And it means something to see each other's expressions, to feed off each other's gestural and facial reactions, to see each other's 'thinking face', or 'eating face', or 'waiting-to-cross-the-street face', to walk side-by-side, and to hug and kiss, and hold hands, or interlock elbows, as you're walking.

I miss home so much. And the familiarity of people's faces and the geography of Hong Kong is probably what gets to me the most.

Well... except the food perhaps.

Yeah...

Food definitely trumps the faces... and everything else.

214 - Leaving a perfectly good bag next to a hot lamp

As you can see from the photograph above, the side of my schoolbag has a great, big hole in it. I had actually left it in contact with the light bulb of my bedside lamp, and after I fell asleep reading a book, the intense heat of the bulb burnt the bag right through. I woke up to the smell of burnt fabric - not cloth, though - nylon infused with plastic. And we all know what burnt plastic smells like.

There's also a problem with the heater in my room. It seems that the university wants us to feel like we're on a tropical island. I think they might be a little paranoid in thinking we're sensitive to the cold, because they've adjusted the entire building's central heating system to provide to us, via each and every heater, with too-hot-to-even-wear-a-T-shirt temperatures. That's right. I'm not wearing a shirt right now. And I'm still sweating. And this is happening in all the rooms. We didn't pay for a five-star suite, so we don't get to moderate our own room temperature. Ridiculous, isn't it?

I've accidentally left a few electrical cords lying on top of the radiator emitting the hellish heatwaves, the electrical cords I use to supply my bedside lamp, or phone charger, with electricity. The rubber coating of the cords has melted slightly and has been deformed. Another example of my carelessness before going to sleep. And I feel pretty stupid about that.

And I hate it.

Sorry, folks, for this is not being a very inspired post. I haven't slept in two days, so I'm pretty exhausted right now. But have you, or anyone else, ever been a fire hazard?

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195 - People who dislike their course

I find it such a pity when people end up disliking the choices they made earlier in their life that they thought would work out in the end. For me, the restrictions my family put on my choices were quite limited, combined with the fact that my own interests and goals were always fairly fluid, and so for me, my future was always flexible, ever-changing, free.

I did a little bit of research into this topic, concerning people who end up hating whatever they're doing or studying, and it's fascinating how the sentiment is shared amongst people in all areas of the global community - from doctors to architects, from farmers to sales reps, from authors, through teachers, to full-time stay-at-home moms. People just get overwhelmed by the duties they have to perform, the commitments that they have, and they end up living a life where the only relief for them is a bottle of vodka on a Saturday night when they finally find the time and cash to spare.

I know a lot of people here at university personally who just hate their course, hate studying it, hate doing the essays, hate the reading, hate everything. To which I ask the question: Why are you still here then?

I'm not saying you have to treat your course like a truelove, but you have to put up with it, you know, and learn to open your mind up and enjoy it. By no means, in my anthropology course, do I enjoy learning the names of twenty different species under the genus Homo, when only one species, sapiens, still exist today. I cannot find passion in learning the names of forty different kinds of blades - to me, they're all for the bloody sake of cutting stuff up and that's that.

But hey, there are ups and downs, and for the sake of your own well-being, and the people that care about you, learn to like it, and if you can't find it in yourself to do so, implement some change.

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192 - When tough-looking guys do non-tough-looking things

Every morning here at my university, I have a free breakfast that comes along with the fee of my accommodation. I love breakfast, and I get really crabby if I miss it. So, I make sure to be up at 7:30, and I get dressed and everything to leave my room at 7:55.

When I get to the canteen at 8 o'clock, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, there's a guy there that works as a server. I'm about the height of his shoulder, barely, yet he's the one that serves me, a guy that's shorter and scrawnier, food.

I'm very wary of the fact that this guy's bigger than me, and it makes me uncomfortable asking him to perform a simple task like putting a sausage or an egg on a plate. There's something about big guys in the catering industry, especially at a university serving breakfast, that's deeply unnerving. I don't quite know what to think about it, because whenever I ask for some toast or some beans, he'll look at me with this menacing gaze that reads, "I don't actually like to work here. I hate this job, but I'm doing it because I need the money."

It's very discomforting, and I almost want to resort my breakfasts to only the other days of the week, when a smaller, friendlier Vietnamese girl works the line instead.

177 - People who videotape lectures

The life of a university student is quite interesting. We are finally adults, responsible for our own money, time, property, physiological well-being, and general lifestyle, emotionally mature, with a supposedly more developed mental health, while also carrying the rights to marry, to vote, to work, to join the army, to drive, to travel abroad without parental consent, to drink, to smoke, to have sex, to gamble, and the list goes on. We choose how we want to live our lives, and in university, that largely includes the way we want to learn.

No longer must we conform to the timetable of high school, be obliged to attend classes, consult teachers about class content, have lunch at a reasonable hour, sleep at a reasonable hour, do our homework on time, or spend hours and hours studying for our tests. We are free of all obligations, our duties are for us to define. We can skip all of our lectures and seminars, we can forget about studying, get wasted every night, sleep in every morning, eat junk food everyday, revise for our examinations at the very last minute, and give less than a rat's tail about our assignments. The only drawback about that game plan is the fact that we would fail at the end of the year, and that's quite a lot of money to send down the drain.

One key thing that you may find different, is the fact that you don't need to take notes down anymore - it's not required of us anymore - as adults, we decide if it's necessary for our tertiary education. We can just sit there, cross-armed the whole time and put the gift of memory to good use by listening intently, taking it all in and deeply engraving it in our heads, or we could leave an audio recorder on the lecturing stand for aural replay on a later date.

But if you really wanted to capture the entire essence of the talk, if you really wanted to experience the lecture like it was exactly once again, you could get a video camera, and tape the whole damn thing.

I thought I've seen some stupid things in my lifetime. This girl put a video camera on the lecturing stand, to tape the professor giving the talk, and the reason for this was that there was nowhere else to put the camera. With the soft, cotton-filled, round-edged seats in the theater, the chairs were useless when it came to balancing anything on top of one of them. She could have just held the thing in her hand the whole time instead, but she probably figured she needed both hands to take down notes. The one thing she didn't figure beforehand was the fact that the lecturer didn't exactly stay at the stand, or in any one particular place.

In fact, the lecturer moved almost everywhere except the lecturing stand. When the professor was standing on the right, the girl student was happy, and she sat there - not listening to the professor - but always eying her precious visual project to make sure she was capturing the video (i.e., being distracted). When the lecturer walked over to the left-hand side of the lecture hall, the girl would get up from her seat, and turn the camera towards him. And then the professor would turn, and walk back in the opposite direction to the right-hand side.

This went on for about ten minutes, and the girl had gotten up seven times. She finally figured - she would have to stop getting up and sitting down - so she found a plastic chair and sat right next to the lecturing stand. This only gave her easier access to her camera, and she would tweak the angle at which her camera was pointed repeatedly at around one tweak per minute. She wasn't even listening to the man. The guy was telling us very interesting things, about the Azande people of Central Africa who believe in witchcraft, who purify their newborns by holding them over smoke, and whose criminal justice system involves determining a suspect's innocence in a crime by observing if a poisoned chicken dies or survives after ingesting a toxic substance.

And this girl wasn't listening to any of this. She kept adjusting her lens, tending to her sacred angle that had to be pointed at the professor at all times. She was distracting two hundred or more other students, and let's face it...

Why waste one hour or more in the future by watching it on tape?

You can just pay attention the one time, the first time, and that's the only hour of your lifetime that that lecture would take out of your time. If you videotaped all of your lectures, you would effectively be taking the same course twice, spending twice the time listening to the same content twice, not forgetting the fact that you would have to spend additional hours more dealing with the technology and the hardware.

Why bother?

This is a classic case of people trying too hard, but achieving less.

171 - When people don't understand how I feel about moving to the UK

There's a lot of emotion brewing inside of me as I enter this final week in Hong Kong. There are many things of which I still haven't done, but had originally planned to do, and a lot of people who I will not see before I fly off to England, but wish I could. I can honestly say, though, that I have tried my best to fit in the most important people and the most important things-to-do into my schedule. I don't know how I'm ever going to stop missing this place after I leave, how I will miss the thousands of streets on which I've walked a thousand times, the unique wonderful taste of the food here I love so much, and the beaches, the carparks, the piers, the malls, the parks, the schools, the bowling alleys, the bookstores, the supermarkets and the countless other locations of which I know like the back of my hand, and altogether, integrate, interweave and incorporate with one another in this giant lattice to constitute this familiar city I describe as my place of birth, my living environment, my home.

When other people hear about why I will miss this place so much, they attempt to reassure me by patting me on the back, brushing my shoulder, and telling me that I can always come back home during my holidays, and that I can keep in touch with people online at any time, but what they fail to realize is that those aren't really valid points.

Truth be told, I never want to come back, and I don't want to talk to anyone online.

About 95% of my life consists of my mother, my father and my best friend. I have dinner with my mom, drinks with my dad, and talk on the phone about everything else with my best buddy. I cannot just fly back whenever I want to, and I cannot just make a call to Hong Kong whenever I want to. There are huge costs for such homebound travel, I don't have the money for me to come back anytime.

Additionally, we each have our respective lives to lead. I've tried communicating with all three of them online, and it's just not the way our relationships work. We are all people who move on quickly (for our own reasons) if the circumstances for communication are inconvenient. I believe our correspondence will gradually be reduced to a minimum, and we all will find a way to accept the geographical and emotional separation between us, and the consequences of said distance.

With all my heart, I don't want to ever come back at this point. Ultimately, I believe I've spent too much of my life in one place, and it would be a waste of my life, and a wastage of this Earth, to spend another day here after I finish my course. I know that may sound bizarre, but that's genuinely what I feel.

People ask me, "why do you say you'll miss it then if you hate it so much?"

Have these people not been paying attention?

I don't hate Hong Kong. When did I say that?

And of course, I'll miss it, why wouldn't I miss it?

It's as simple as this: I am very excited and so glad to leave, but I will miss my childhood home nonetheless. I want to go and explore the whole wide world, starting with England, but it's just going to be emotionally difficult to move on, because Hong Kong has been my entire life. Is that so difficult to comprehend, or are my thoughts really that convoluted?

169 - When other people want to throw my books away

Hello, bloggers. It's been a long hiatus, hasn't it, this summer?

I think I'm going to be back now, back to posting everyday about something that gets on my nerves. Not a lot has come to pass in the past three or four months... I got my exam results, and I didn't really make it into my desired university in London, but I'm going to be studying at the University of Kent instead.

It's located in the city of Canterbury, about forty minutes to the East of London, quite a short distance away from the South-Eastern coast of England. I was looking on the university website, at what people do on their weekends and holidays, and apparently, students can take just two trains, and in just three or four hours, be in Brussels or Paris, which I think is quite neat.

I say goodbye to Hong Kong on the 20th, ten days from today. It's already been emotional for me, gradually packing up everything I own into boxes and suitcases, and going out with my family and friends as often as I can. Hong Kong has been my home for such a long time, and I know every little thing about it. I hate to leave, but on the contrary, I also remember that I was dying to move out of here a few months ago.

Throughout the thoroughly depressing and already homesick three weeks prior to this day, my grandmother has told me periodically that I should throw away some of my old books, or give them away to my younger cousins, an orphanage, a charity group, or the church, because I won't read them anymore, and because it just takes up space in my room here in Hong Kong, an off-the-wall suggestion to me, with a justification that's ridiculous.

I was thinking about packing them all into boxes, and throughout the year, gradually have them shipped to the UK, where I will find the space for them all. I know I don't read the Mr.Men series, or my Goosebumps collection anymore, but why must I get rid of them?

And besides, who are you to say that my property should be dumped in the trash just because they take up space? They're my books, that rest in my room, out of your way, not a bother to you at all. I never tell you to throw away your property, like the spare light bulbs in our cupboard, that we bought years ago and don't even fit into our new lights, the herbal medicine in the fridge which we haven't used in over ten years, and the dozens of Reader's Digest that you keep on your shelf and haven't ever opened after the one time. I don't ask you to dispose of them, because you obviously cherish, and think of as worth keeping, all that stuff that's surely older than my books. Obviously, f I deemed my stuff a bunch of ancient crap, I would've thrown it away ages ago. But I treasure them, so I don't.

But these are books. Educational compilations of texts, of facts and fiction, that enlighten us. Why throw them away? My kids could read them in the future. I could read them again, you never know. And studies have shown that people who generally spend a great deal of time around books have higher Intelligence Quotients. They must continue to exist around me to make me smarter!

...throw them away? No way in Hell.

157 - People who never meet their deadlines

I'm not the only one who's bound for University College London in the UK. I have a classmate who also plans on heading to that institution for university. He's an interesting fellow, someone who I feel privileged to know. He's very conversational and straight-forward, and tells a lot of fascinating stories. He doesn't really know how to complement people, though, and he's not the kind of person you would typically look to for consolation. But that doesn't bother me, 'cause I appreciate his cynicism, however, the thing that does annoy me about him is the way he leaves everything 'til the last minute.

No, let me make a correction: he leaves everything 'til after the last minute, after every deadline.

The university wants us to apply for accommodation before the thirty-first of May, and he hasn't done so yet. At the point when I heard this, I was already quite annoyed because I thought I didn't have to think about university applications ever again, as I had managed all the paperwork a while ago now, but apparently not - I have to help this guy out.

He says he didn't receive the application forms from the university. He realized two weeks ago that it's the only university he applied to that hadn't mailed him any information yet.

But it's only at this point that he thought to himself, that maybe he should have sent them an e-mail, asking why. And now he plans to write an e-mail of inquiry, one day after the deadline for the accommodation application.

Seriously, then what? Wait another three weeks for the form to get sent here?

The deadline was the thirty-first of May. You have no guaranteed place to live in anymore.

He's been like this since I first met him, he's been late with his geography coursework, his mathematics coursework, his English essays, and his physics lab reports.

Everybody waits until the last minute before they have to do their work, of course.

But get your shit together before the deadline arrives, because if you really wanted to go to London, like I do, that's what you have to do.