Today's sentiment: Sleepy.
I went on a journey last night, lying in Xiaoxi's bed. I'm not quite sure how to describe the feeling of being awake for hours, going off on my own trails of thought, writing words into my phone, while Xiaoxi lies next to me the whole time asleep. Yinyin was awake of course. She stays up all night long. I heard the sound of Tiktok coming in from her room. Xiaoxi’s dog Xiaohei was asleep on the wooden floorboards (which are surely already covered in his fur), occasionally standing up to walk around, his nails loudly clicking, then falling back into fits of snoring.
All of the American holidays pass me by here. Halloween has once more been relegated to my imagination. I think a year ago I was going to try being obsessed with halloween, spending the whole month counting down to it. Maybe that was the year before. Either way, I failed. No new halloween memories were formed. I learned nothing about whatever it is Halloween is supposed to represent.
I am once more quitting caffeine. Let’s see if it sticks this time. Last time I kept thinking about the eventual day when I would be able to drink caffeine healthily again. I’m not sure if that day is ever coming. I enjoy the feeling of being overcaffienated. I crave that feeling. So it’s not like my resistance going down after months of not drinking caffeine will somehow keep me in check. It’s only through discipline that I can drink caffeine healthily, and I’ve shown again and again that I’m not disciplined enough.
I have fantasies of being a guy drinking tea, taking in the subtle flavors. I imagine myself one day becoming an actual adult, streaming myself to my adoring fans (because that’s what I imagine being an adult is like), drinking tea and talking about it. I’d have all sorts of tea recommendations for my plebeian audience — flavors that can change their lives. All those tactile pleasures, I need to replace them with something else — imagine the time before I was addicted to caffeine and return to that — if that time ever existed.
I got to my campus too early because I wanted to get lunch before classes are let out at 11:25 and the cafeteria fills to the brim. Instead I got there at 11:30. I had to stand at the back of a line that curved out of the second floor dining hall I like, into the dining hall next to it, around the escalator and all the way to the windows on the opposite wall. It’s the longest I’ve ever seen the line. In the end I still got what I wanted: 土豆丝. In China potatoes are often cooked as long thin threads, together with peppers. Somehow the potatoes end up nice and flexible. Whenever I try to make potatoes this way, they turn out very rigid. Maybe it has to do with the amount of oil that’s used. It’s the best vegetarian food they serve at my schools cafeteria. The egg dishes are also ok. Most of the other things they serve make me suspect that they’re cooked in lard. It’s only potatoes and eggs that I can eat in peace.
I figured that on my first day during this return to the caffieneless life, I might as well engage in a different kind of unhealthiness and drink an orange soda. Below the cafeteria, there’s a lady who sells various bottled drinks from behind a counter. Water and coconut milk are on the counter, so you just need to pick them up, but all the other drinks are behind her and you have to specify them. I asked for Mirinda (美年达), and she handed me a Fanta (芬达). I felt some weird embarrassment. These are the two brands of Orange soda here — they both have orange labels, and I guess if you’re not paying attention they look similar. I felt like an old man asking for a Coke when clearly all there is is Pepsi. I walked over to the library, which is where I am typing this now, and drank the whole bottle as quickly as I could. My hope was that my body would be able to process it all and pee it out before my class started, rather than halfway through my class. The last two times I had to pee very badly the whole class, to the point I was barely able to concentrate.
Hours have passed by, and now once more I’m lying in darkness. This whole day I’ve been drifting from one place to another, not quite certain what is happening to me. This is what happens when I don’t get enough sleep and don’t have any caffeine to trick me into thinking I’m awake. When I was in high school, I’d always feel this way during afternoons. I had the same sleep schedule as Balkwell’s Danish friend. I’d go to bed as soon as I got home from school then spend the alone. I didn’t have a laptop or even a phone. Our desktop computer was downstairs, and I didn’t really like leaving my room much when everyone else was asleep. So all I had were books and my DS. By the time I was in high school, I hadn’t bought a new DS game in years. I just played the same games over and over — mostly Animal Crossing: WIld World, Final Fantasy III, the Gameboy Advance version of Super Mario Bros 3, and Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. It was boring playing the same games over and over (which I mostly just enjoyed for the music), so I spent most of my time reading. Used books were cheaper than games, and my mom often took me to the library after school. I read Sarashina Nikki, Ezra Pound’s translations of Noh, Lalka, Tanizaki’s Naomi (痴人の愛), and just about every Murakami Haruki novel somewhere between 2am and 5am. It's impossible for me to not associate these particular books with a certain sort of lonely darkness.
During the day I was an object that existed among strangers. The hallways of my school were so narrow, and every time classes changed there was a sea of people to navigate. All of my friends graduated when I was still just a sophomore, and I didn't really know anyone in any of my classes after that. People would sometimes talk to me, but I would always assume they were making fun of me, even when 9 times out of 10 they weren't. I very rarely ever took books to school. I didn't have a locker, so I tried to not carry too much. I don't think I talked about books with anyone. There was one girl, Tori, who liked K-pop a lot, so I managed to talk to her about some Korean indie bands I liked. I don't remember ever talking about Shibuya-kei, which I was just beginning to explore.
It amazes me how computerless my nights were back then. In middleschool I did have a computer in my room, so I spent all night playing emulated video games or listening to music off of Youtube. After I got out high school, I moved my room back downstairs to the room with the computer in it, and once more my nights were spent on the internet. But in high school, all I had was books. I suppose now that I have a Macbook I'll never again have to be separated from a computer. Much more sinisterly, I have my phone. How much has having a phone affected me? What kinds of transformations has it caused in my brain? That is the subject of later essay. All I can say now is that it's clearly affected me enough that it doesn't even occur to me most days that there was a time, the majority of my life, that I was phoneless. Being that I need to have a phone with me to pay for things, it seems increasingly unimaginable to ever return to that phonelessness. Why do I want to return? Why, for the past five years, have all my hopes and desires amounted to a kind of return? Again, we'll talk about that later.