2023-06-17 | Back to Square One
Let’s go back to square one.
Okay, this is the very first post written in English.
I am not a native English speaker. However, given my academic background, I am supposed to read and write English articles fluently. Well, yes and no, just like the answer to many other questions regarding my life. I could intepret English without translating into my mother tongue in my minds, but I still never feel like reading long English passages. I could work on my research in English, but academic articles require throughout revision before submission; or write short emails, diaries and game reviews in English, which I fear that I have never expressed my thoughts clearly.
But when I made up my mind to change the situation - attempting to write a blog in English, there must be some strong motivations behind. Here: Snowy Day with Peter, secondary blog of PeterCxy, mainly for short articles in English.
By very rare chance I found this interesting blog. As some people on iM were talking about New Year’s Eve Gala in their senior high school, I jumped into the discussion and recalled my memory of Senior 2’s Gala. Our class presented a situational comedy featuring ill-humor and tasteless jokes, which was welcomed with bursts of laughter.
I worked on the PPT which imitates the style of Galgame (including UI, and choices that can be selected by the audience, though every single choice leads to the same ending), and also responsible for collecting and editing music, sound effects and images.
The jokes were just terrible, but I was so proud of myself at that time. The atmosphere was like, I was the only one who can use Photoshop in my class, and thus I have to work on so many things in limited time. To showcase how horrible these jokes were, I will give you an example:
Never Gonna Give You Up
I recovered documents like this from my old laptop, which is a ThinkPad E480 with i5-8250U (4C8T, BF 1.8 GHz, TB 3.0 GHz), 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. It is not a thin-and-light laptop, but a heavy brick with a 65W power adapter. The performance is also not good enough for today’s standard, but it is still enough for my parents to use.
They were all created in my senior high school because this laptop was bought in my Senior 1 (2019). Among them are many interesting creations, including short films for school activities, short novels for writing contests, and blogs.
Yes, blog. I have been writing blog since 2019 - well, to be accurate, I was writing blog in 2019. I have not written a single word as diary from 2020 to 2022.
I used Github Pages to deploy my blog at that time. However, that Github account and the local blog repository were deliberately deleted in 2020. I have no idea why I did that, but I did, just like I have reset my game saves for dozens of times.
But when I deleted it, I also archived the blog in HTML format. Why? I don’t know since I am actually not a fan of reviewing my past. But I did, and I am glad that I did. I can recover some of my memories of 2019 from these archives.
One of the blog written in Oct 2019 has been retrieved here. From today’s view, it’s meaningless cringy yells from a naive child. But let’s not be sarcastic about it, because I has always been a naive child.
One interesting thing is that, this was written before my first exposure to ACGN (in Nov 2019), which dramatically changed my worldview and led me to gradually form theories about the world and the society. Well, also made me a weeb, which is, simply a fact that should not be identified as “either good or bad”. Thus at that time, I yelled because I knew I was facing problems, paradoxes and dilemmas, but I had no idea how to solve them. And I did not solve them, nor even tried to solve them.
Let’s set down to the main topic. In that blog, I found Typeblog, PeterCxy’s main blog. The blog only contains a few English articles. However, from a link in my 2019’s blog, I knew that Typeblog was a Chinese blog with hundreds of entries back in 2019. So why? It appeared that he has rebuilt this blog in Apr 2022, archiving all the old entries locally and only retrieving a few of them to the new blog.
That was the very last things I would expect. The worst thing could happen in the web era is that content was DELETED DELIBERATELY. Imagine searching for an inspiring article for 4 years, only to find the author has deleted it. Still I am not a fan of archiving webpages or even favorating them in my browser, leading me to infinite regret when I want to find them again. But when I do found them, I will feel unparalleled satisfaction.
However - then I found a button called Shorts in Typeblog, which leads to Snowy Day with Peter. It is a secondary blog, containing dozens of diary-like articles, mostly in English, but also one Chinese article titled 「初恋」, and another Japanese article titled 「生きる理由」. I was just shocked by the fact that he can write in three languages fluently, and also that someone would keep a multi-language blog.
Then I spent an hour or so to digest entries whose title attracted me. He writes the short articles in a secondary blog, because he has very high standard for the main blog (searching for a topic, mindstorming, writing, revising, and finally publishing) which takes too much time. At the same time he wants to record some life thoughts, so that’s how Snowy Day was born, in a very casual way.
I would conclude he is a perfectionist, but also a pragmatist. He is serious about blogging. He loves writing, but he also knows that writing is not his main job. He is a programmer, and also a student. He has to balance his time between work, study and life. He has to make compromises and choices, and part of this paragraph was generated by Copilot.
Again, back to square one. This passage, though pretty long, has not actually answered why I want to write a blog in English. But, seriously, I would answer, why do I need to have a reason?
Okay I will give you one brief reason. When I write in Chinese, there are so many things that I do not express clearly. I was imaging a reader, just a copy of me, whom I am talking to. He knows all the secret of my life, and I do not need to explain explicitly. I have so many experiences, thoughts, feelings in life, and some of the details are omitted so I do not feel so cringy.
But when writing in English, I could not even convey my ideas clearly due to limited vocabulary and grammar. I have to explain everything in detail, and even though I have no or few readers, I have to write as if I was talking to a stranger. I have to be more careful about what I am writing, and I have to be more honest about my feelings. I have to be more serious about writing, and I have to be more serious about life. Copilot are definitely an expert in composing parallel sentences.
And that was fine. I have to change myself someday. I know some are leading a more fruitful and satisfactory life than me, and that’s why I am not satisfied with my current life. I do lead a life just like many other students with a middle-class family background, with abaudant material resources, a relatively free life, and a promising future. But I am not satisfied with it. I WANT TO BE BETTER, not because I can be better or I should be better, but because I know there are better possibilities in life, and I want to explore them.
To become better, I will have to do things that I have never done before, not good at, not interested in, or even afarid of. And writing English blog is one of them, in an effort to reflect on my life and thoughts, but not to show off my English skills. English itself is just a tool, and what I need is exactly a tool, no matter it is English, Chinese, or even Japanese.
And that’s it. This passage mainly records the process of how I found PeterCxy’s blog, and how I was inspired by him, which just happened last night. But I do have a lot of things to read and write about. About past, present, future, and beyond imagination.
I go jogging in the evening for 20-30 minutes almost everyday, and I have been thinking about a lot of things during jogging. I listen to no music, but just to my thoughts. Though most of the ideas are unorganized and unclear, some are still worth reflecting and exploring. And it was always fun to exchange some random thoughts with friends, which finally leads me to feel obligated about writing a blog to record the interesting seeds of thoughts.
And that’s it. See you tomorrow, because that’s a special day.