I was supposed to go do some studying.
That was the plan, anyway. But with my phone almost out of battery as the perfect excuse, I managed to delay the whole thing from the moment I woke up at 12:30 all the way to 3 in the afternoon. Honestly, I do not even know what I mean anymore when I say I am going to study. I end up looking at undergraduate material, because studying this major still feels like I am doing it as an outsider to my own field. I cannot really throw myself into it. Only the more basic stuff goes in at all, and even then it is the kind of thing I will probably forget almost immediately.
I left the dorm fully determined to go study, but somehow my legs carried me to the lab instead. I told myself I could at least charge my phone there. In the end, of course, I got to the lab and forgot to charge it, then inexplicably turned on the computer and started reading news and scrolling through Weibo.
By the time I remembered what I was supposed to be doing, it was already 3 o'clock, which is also when I ended up writing this.
I had also thought about taking a trip over to Jiang'an, just to wander around and see the impressive study rooms and library there. But I changed my mind again. Ever since coming here, everyone has been busy doing their own thing on weekends. My home is too far away, so going back is not an option. And if I went to Jiang'an and could not find where I was trying to go, I would just come back empty-handed. That has already happened to me twice before. This time I would have had someone with me, but I was too sleepy and too lazy to bother.
For four nights in a row now, I have not gone to sleep until after 4 a.m. Most nights I get into bed around 1, and then instantly stop feeling sleepy. So then it becomes American TV shows, Weibo, news, Zhihu. Last night there were not many updates to watch, so I ended up putting on a variety drama I had never seen before. It was not good, but thanks to sheer compulsiveness I still finished it. American shows are more reliable after all.
The time I wake up in the morning is completely unpredictable. Sometimes 11, sometimes 1. It is only a two-hour difference, but for me that is the difference between having lunch and not having lunch. During these four days of sleeping after 4, I skipped lunch on half of them. Dinner and a late-night meal, though, are absolutely non-negotiable. They are so essential that even if I am exhausted, I will still stay awake until that hour just to eat. And once I do eat, any sleepiness I had is gone again.
For two nights in a row I stayed in the lab until after 2 before heading back. For three nights in a row I got back to the dorm after 2 and discovered, somewhat miraculously, that the dorm had not been locked yet. It immediately reminded me of undergrad, when coming back late meant having to call out to the dorm auntie to let me in.
One of those late nights was spent at an internet café. I went there to download something: Visual Studio. Since there is a free version, I can finally use it openly instead of sneaking around with a pirated copy, so this trip felt completely justified. What I did wrong was not downloading it straight to my USB drive. Once the download finished, transferring those 7-plus gigabytes to the flash drive was basically as slow as downloading the 7-plus gigabytes in the first place. So I spent the equivalent of two download times just moving it over. Then my compulsiveness kicked in again and I insisted on downloading the flagship version too, just so I would not miss out. In the end, I spent four times the amount of time it should have taken to download one piece of software, all for this supposedly epoch-making process. Still, I will probably be using this installer for at least the next couple of years, so maybe it counts.
And sure enough, after all that, when I got back to my own computer the MD5 check still said there was something wrong with the compressed package. But somehow I completed the installation anyway. There was even an error message in the middle. The software still opened normally. I have decided to accept that and move on.
The whole downloading process was spent playing LOL. I used to play with friends, but now I can only queue up and get matched with random teammates. Strangely enough, I have been playing much more smoothly this way, which made me quietly blame my former teammates a little. Especially in the first game: the team was awful, the kills were something like 10-plus to 40-plus at the start. It should have been an unwinnable match, but after more than 50 minutes we somehow turned it around and won. Of course, one major reason was that the other side only had four players. Still, that game felt great. I was playing a tank, and there is something deeply satisfying about feeling impossible to kill.
Then there was today. I opened Kugou Music and started listening to songs online, and by accident I heard Jay Chou's "Ye Dian Ka" in a new playlist. It suddenly hit me that he is finally close to releasing a new album. But I am not nearly as excited as I was back in high school. Back then, listening to his songs got my phone confiscated once, and my learning device confiscated once too. He did not release one last year, he has gotten older, and he is married now.
So that brings me back to the point: a weekend full of indecision.