My first book
Early fall is very nice in my hometown, no wonder many of my classmates were doing reunions. Although I was not able to go, I still saw many messages and pictures on my group chats. This is a looking forward thing to me as I am curious about how people are changing since our graduation. I felt most of them did not have big changes in terms of spirit. Some have a fatter belly 🙂 some have a draining and grey face (maybe work too hard). Some girls still tried very hard to look beautiful and polish, some girls are still like boys, e.g., with a man-style T-shirt and cap on the head. This nostalgic atmosphere motivated me to go through my bookshelf and look through my best friends’ things I brought from China. One of them is this book I have handwritten on my notebook — “my first book” 🙂
The preface is called “yesterday, today”. One sentence is “what is today?” haha very philosophical. I also wrote a postface for this book three years later, mentioning “it is a very beautiful and important period of my student life”. My character writing is much improved 🙂
So what is this book about? it wrote down a lot of problems we created, discussed and argued in middle school. During my middle school, I have a group of good friends who like to discuss math, science, history and philosophy … especially me and my best friend Mr. J (I have a lot of good J friends by coincidence). We talked during class and passed notes around while the teachers were writing on board. We made some questions in our physics, math, chemistry, electronics classes and talked to our teachers after our classes. We talked while we walked out of school at the end of day. Mr. J likes to create a lot of difficult (non-sense :)) questions to discuss, for example,
- In summer, why the soup with salt is easier to keep but the soup with sugar is easier to go bad?
- In a raining day, suppose somebody does not carry an umbrella. Then no matter what is his speed of walking home, does he get the same amount of rain water?
- If we recursively put a pressure cook in another pressure cook and so on, can we increase the inner pressure of the most inside pressure cook?
- A bucket weighs G newton and its height is h meters, what is the momentum needed to pull it out of water with an even speed?
- Prove square root of 2 is irrational number
After we graduate, I decided to put together all of our discussions by collecting the notes and writing down thoughts.
A few funny anecdotes I still remember about Mr. J. One time we were arguing about some Chinese phrases. Mr. J went back home (20 min one way) during lunchtime (1 hour total) and picked up a super thick dictionary and carried back to school so that we can continue discussing. Another funny story is that one time during our crafting class, Mr. J kept asking me if he can borrow my scissor and it happened a couple of times in a short class. Later his deskmate tells me that he planned to keep asking me until I was super annoyed and decided to just let him keep the scissor, haha. I remember that me and my girlfriends were often laughing very hard on the bus when we saw him pedaling very hard on his bike in attempt to catch our bus. Sadly, our golden friendship ends when he started to write romantic poems to me and tried to find me at my home. I was just wishing we could still freely discuss things like before.