Unfinished Product

Woke up late, but that is nothing unusual. I mechanically brushed my teeth and put the espresso machine on the stove. I can’t image how I used to get up at 5am, 6 days a week in order to get to school at 6:30 AM. (That was the rule; anyone who arrived late would have to stay after school for detention time. The detention was not long though, because the night class and study groups started at 7pm. A regular kid at our school spent most of his days at his desk. Imagine the three sessions of the day go like: 6:30am to 12:00 pm; 2pm to 6pm, then 7pm to 10pm. But that was long time ago.) The bus came late too, but I somehow ended up arriving at my class on time. Maybe I should get up late on a regular bases (taking the weekly statistics into serious consideration -- today was the only day I made it to school this week). More than 100 minutes of bus ride led me to a 90-minute class. I did not realize it was my last class for the semester, until our teacher thanked us at the end of the seminar. Wow, I have slept through so many of them since last October. I have become amazingly lazy since high school time; and yet, I am not unhappy having left the extremely strict school behind.

We learnt to point fingers at other nations besides our own, all the way through high school. In contrary in my current school, the seminars feel like a bunch of “finger pointing” too, but at ourselves. If the 90-minute lamentation directing at the “complete failure” of capitalism, or eating meat is mass-murder or the “melting-pot-society” is the highest achievement of human cultural form, I frequently remind myself that, at least there are disputes; imagine a class in which you have to write down everything the teacher says, the book says, and any disagreement could have you kissed good-bye to a higher education, or your parents “dropping by” teacher’s home after dinner with a red envelope containing a stack of cash.

Sometimes I am confused about how I feel about all of these: the goodness of self-critic vs. the “euphorication” of certain continent; the elitism reproaches to the society forgetting the majority of the population does not have graduate-school education; and how many hard-core vegans would pierce through own flesh so that a piece of metal can be hanged on the wound, or mark their own skin with needles and ink in some language that they don’t even speak. (Yes, I have known them in person.) What does refusing meat mean to you? What does your own body mean to you?

I owned a telescope. I saw the creators on the Moon and almost burnt my eyes blind when I forgot to add the filter. (As I bent over to adjust the angle, the Sun light burnt a small hole on my coat, and I was about to my eyes directly behind it. Lucky me.) In a starry night, I would spend hours on the house roof and aim for the silver tiny lights: the world around me felt weightless: does it matter to the universe that we are facing final exams in a few weeks? Does it matter that we eat meat or not? Does it matter how the nationals’ borders are defined? Does it matter if we stuck in the airport as the volcanoes erupt? Or the buses come late? Or the new policies take place? Or some avant garde fashion companies discontinue employing size-zero models?

Someone told me that humans were just nature’s experiment. If so, we are unfinished products.