Last Friday the afternoon rain was light but the wind was strong. It felt as if the damp air had been swapped out for a colder north wind. When I got home that evening, the windows were all open and the rooms were cold. I closed half of them and lasted about half an hour before closing the rest. The thermometer read 26.3°C and 43% humidity.
My younger child had been sick with a cold for three and a half days. I had planned to keep him home, but in the older child’s class notification group the teacher said that any absence required a hospital certificate; without it, don’t ask for leave. Their class had once topped the school’s leave-request rankings.
His temperature was normal. He took one Kuaike cold capsule, drank more water, and went to school.
Last week I noticed that walking a loop in the park in slippers didn’t bother me, so I switched from flip-flops to ordinary slippers. Flip-flops shift your weight forward and slap against your heels; on rainy days your lower legs end up dotted with leaves and mud. The advantage is that they are open and breathable—every toenail space feels clean.
The ordinary slippers also had their turn on Friday, when the light rain and showers kept coming and stopping. I decided not to take the e-bike and walked to pick up the child from school, a few hundred meters, less than a kilometer. When it wasn’t raining it was fine. When it was, the fourth toe on my left foot hurt. Back home I washed it and found a blister. I didn’t put anything on it, just rinsed it clean and changed into flip-flops to keep it dry and ventilated. Today it has scabbed over and is much better. I looked it up: for limb wounds that aren’t deep incisions and don’t need stitches, healing takes roughly 7–15 days; stitched wounds take about half a month to two months. Without secondary infection, things move faster.
On wet, slippery ground, perforated clogs are not the best choice; shoes with better enclosure are safer. Or just reduce activity and reduce the chance of an accident.
I finished The Complete Biography of Du Yuesheng, My First Half of Life, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, The Biography of Lin Huiyin, and volumes 1–5 of The Temperature of History. I came away with a lot of examples and stories but not much sense of the underlying principles. What it did do was stir my interest in history. A few days ago I started Reading Mao Zedong’s Notes and found that reading without stopping may be the only answer that never gets fully solved.
This “Party-style eight-legged essay” can also be applied to blogging. Its traits are empty talk with no substance, putting on airs to intimidate, flavorless language like a beggar, listing A, B, C, D as if opening a Chinese medicine shop, and being irresponsible and harmful everywhere.
What people now call “nonsense literature” is probably a subset of that.
Industry jargon belongs to the posturing-and-bluffing category. I do it too.
“Flavorless language like a beggar”—I feel I belong to that type.
“A, B, C, D, opening a Chinese medicine shop”—I understand this as stating and displaying facts without processing them or offering a solution. You’d need a pharmacist’s license for that.
One classmate had the same nickname as someone else: Camel, because he was always first in long-distance runs. The only time I wanted to take first place, he sprinted past me in the last 200 meters. My mother called him “Camel Thorn,” though I don’t know why.
Zhou Enlai’s line “study for the rise of China,” and Hitler’s and Luo Yonghao’s My Struggle—putting any of it into practice is genuinely hard. Anytime is not too late.
Previously I saw a blogger reading Selected Works of Mao and a data-based estimate of class strata. I checked: the first piece in Selected Works is “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society.” Seen now, it looks like big-data analysis, audience targeting. Maybe everything has people and the economy as its common ground.
Many startups treat Selected Works of Mao as required reading. It seems they have grasped the essence of matters, things, and people.
