My 1995
11/15/20 In the previous years, I can spend $20 renting a skii set from school to enjoy an entire weekend. This year this benefit is no longer possible with hundreds of covid cases confirmed every week in our campus. So I bought a XC skii set (luxurious :)). I also have a snowtube myself too. Now I am looking forward to snow. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow 😀 This is our Oct snow, but not enough!
What were you doing in 1995? I wrote this book. The three characters in the title are translated as “following” “fate” “hall”. Yucky, when I looked at this gaudy title right now, I almost throwed up 😀
This book is written for a friend. We haven’t talked for years, but recently, he sent me a message and asked me to feel free to reach out to him if I need any help during pandemics. That brought me back some nostalgic mood, so I digged out this book. This book collected a set of STEM questions we have discussed in school. The questions were made up by ourselves, coming from our daily study life. Some were discussed sneakily during classes (he and I sat across a small hallway). Some were discussed and argued among a bunch of friends (sometimes even teachers were involved). Here are some examples of short questions.
(1) a car is driving s meters ahead of you with a speed of v1. What is the average speed you should use to catch up the car so that within time t, you can drive in parallel with the car in the speed of v1. (easy?!?! :))
(2) we have a a bucket with the gravity of G and height h. How much “Work” it takes to pull this bucket out of water with a constant speed.
(3) One triangle can cover two identical circles, what is the maximum radius the circle can have? (wow, this one has two pages of answers)
(4) What energy the spaceships use to fly in space and how they decide the directions in space?
(5) In a raining day, one person does not carry an umbrella. If he wants to go home, no matter what speed he uses, he would take the same amount of water. Prove or disprove.
I wrote a postface for this book three years later in 1998. “Those questions are doodled in pieces of papers and carried around in our pockets. We have discussed and argued. In retrospect, it is a very pure and beautiful period of school life.”
Behind the book, there were quite a lot of funny stories between me and this guy. One day, we were arguing about a very niche word. At the lunch time, he went home (very far) and carried back a giant book (very heavy) of dictionary for us to study further. I was like “AH?” when I saw him with a giant book in his hand and ran out of breaths standing at the door of our classroom. Another time, in our craft class, he borrowed my scissor, gave me back, borrowed my scissor, gave me back, back and forth many times. Later his desk-mate told me that “Mr. X said if he kept bugging you to borrow your scissor, you would get annoyed and just let him keep it” 😀 There were some sweet moments too. I lived far from school. Later, he moved closer to my home. When my girl friends and I took bus home, we sometimes can see that he was riding bike hard and trying to catch our bus. We exchanged some looks and the girls were then laughing hard.
A man and a woman can have different kinds of relationships, friends, soulmates, family, sex partners, lovers … I think between me and him, it is mostly a friendship. Then what happened later is no longer fun to me. At some point, he copied me a love poem. Quite a lot of years later when I arrived in US, he asked if he can be my boyfriend … I don’t know why I did not follow up the love path with him. I am sure it would be a safe and sweet path. But what is love? Maybe what “fleabag” said is true:
“Love is awful. It’s awful. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, distance yourself from the other people in your life. It makes you selfish. It makes you creepy, makes you obsessed with your hair, makes you cruel, makes you say and do things you never thought you would do. It’s all any of us want, and it’s hell when we get there. So no wonder it’s something we don’t want to do on our own. I was taught if we’re born with love then life is about choosing the right place to put it. People talk about that a lot, feeling right, when it feels right it’s easy. But I’m not sure that’s true. It takes strength to know what’s right. And love isn’t something that weak people do. Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope. I think what they mean is, when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope“