This might be my only entry for a very long time to come...I don't know what senior 3is gonna be like. I don't know what I'm gonna be like. Anyway, this entry is NOT about studying, so...here it is.

    I played ball with Mao a few days ago. We played with a bunch of twenty-year-olds, they weren't much talent...anyway, we took a break and they lit up their cigarettes and started to talk amongst themselves. They were in their early twenties, but none of them are in school or have a job. They live with their parents( it's funny, when we were playing they called us kids, but I really don't see how they are grown compared to us). One of them started talking about getting a job, and said he wanted to be an interpreter for a company. That got my interest. Here is a unemployed, "un-universitized" guy talking about being an interpreter. There's alot of university graduates who doesn't even consider English as a job option. Then he carried on and said he wanted to be one of those oral interpreters in actual meetings, not the type that translates documents. He said that an average university grad could do that. He said his advantage is spoken English, and if some slang was used he could understand while others could not. That's when I asked him if he has stayed in the U.S. He said 8 years.

    8 years...an advantage given to few. Yet here he is, unemployed, living with parents. An absolute stand-still, not going anywhere, not doing shit with his life. I could understand if he came from an undereducated, low-wage family. Not if he came back from the U.S. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying by staying abroad you're set for life (sometimes you have to work even harder). But at least it means he had a good family background. Yet he let himself slip this low.

     Have you ever seen a older person and thought, shit, that guy's like me. I wonder if I'm going to end up like him. It's like looking into the mirror and seeing your future self. It's an unsettling feeling. Imagine if you meet a janitor and he said he graduated from our school.

    There are times in our life where we get to choose what we want to see every morning in the mirror. Theday after tomorrow is the start of such time. It's not the only time, but it is nevertheless. What do we want to see? How do we make it happen? We do anything we could. Believe me, there is nothing more happy than seeing exactly what you want  to see in the mirror. Imagine if you're everything you want. It never happens, but at least we could try to get as close as we could.

      So the question is: What do you see now? What do you want to see in the future? How do you get from now, to the future? At the moment, our image is blurry. We get to sketch the outlines, the frames, we get to colour our eyes and lips...

      Starting from...now. 

    

   A few days ago I saw this kid and his mom in a restaurant. The mom was a very formidable woman, and the kid was a chubby, bespectacled kid about ten or eleven years old. They were waiting for their food, and the mom was checking on the Ehglish words the boy had learned. You know, the mom says a word in Chinese and the kid says the English translation then spell it out. All of this seemed normal. But then their food came, and I was suprised to see that the kid was sent to another table by his mom to finish the "test" before he could eat. The mom did the "testing" while she ate.

   Ok, I know a lot of you guys think that the mom was just being strict, and that she meant good gor her son. I'm sure that's true. But that doesn't make this right. I see the kid (he was not upset, and acted quite natural), and I know exactly what he will be like. He will be a good student, probably going to 人大 or something. He will be in the ''good class'', getting good grades. No ups and downs, his school life will be pretty much inturbulent.

    Isn't that what a student should be like? At times, I do want to be like that. I wished I had strict parents, guiding me step by step through my childhood. That way I wouldn't have gone astray, and end up where I want to be a lot easier and faster.

    In reality, learning things on your own, by the hard way, is actually good, I think. I think one needs to go down the stray road, hit the dead end, turn back, and then travel on along the right way. A strictly guided child might be told by his parents ''That's the wrong way.'' and be spared of making a mistake. But he will always wonder what it's like to go down that road.

     First term of Senior 2, I got into dancing. And that was all I thought of. My parents knew it was gonna affect my studies, but they just stood back and waited. There were times when I went to practice when I got home straight from school. They never stopped me. Now you may think them irresponsible, but in reality they want to let me learn by myself. They want me to feel the mud in my mouth when i hit the dirt. And I did. I got the worst grade in my highschool years that term. I was depressed for like a week.

    Sometimes I say, why didn't you stop me? But imagine if they did. Sure, I'd have gotten good grades, but I would always look back, and wondered what it would like to be to stand on stage, in that spotlight. I' probably wonder for the rest of my life.

     I thank God for the unstrict parents I have. I may not be in a very good form, or stature due to this, but I'll be proud to say, the little that I have learnt, I learnt on my own.

     I can imagine that kid in the restaurant looking at me and say: ''What a loser. I'm better than you.'' He's probably right. But I wouldn't switch places with him. At least I know the feeling of paying the price for my mistake. At least I know what it felt like to go down a dead end road.

     i would rather be bruised all over than not knowing the feel of pain.