I am so sick of writing the words 中国经济的发展 which means "China's economy's development." It's the go-to phrase that I feel I've been programmed to use throughout my Chinese language-learning career if asked to "make a sentence using X sentence structure."
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I've been journaling recently. I think it's a healthy habit for someone like myself who tends to over-analyze everything ever. This way, my journal bears the brunt of my over-analyzing, rather than my conscious self or those around me.
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"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential"
-Bruce Lee
"What you do is simply the proof of what you believe."
-Some smart guy in a lecture
"Most people fail because they just don’t want to improve badly enough."
-?
"A grocery shopping bag is both incorrect and incomplete if it does not have green vegetables bursting from the top of it."
"You can't keep anything up sleeves that you don't have."
"Is it stupid and arrogant that I list my own quotes on my blog? Likely."
-Chris Kyle
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This is really excellent. Really. Thanks to Robb.
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"All you men and women who are hoping to give birth to Aristotle, that ship has sailed."
"...the problem McTaggart had is that he was an idiot."
"...I'm just saying that what's good for the goose is what's good for the gander, not that I know what that means..."
(After making an 0ff-color joke): "That was to make FUN of misogyny."
-Meta-Physics Professor
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"1 donut plus 1 donut equals what? One big donut, right?"
-Classical Chinese Professor
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I won't write much about this: My Classical Chinese Professor gave the class the option of cancelling the (comprehensive) final exam and putting it's 20% of our final grade into the other 4 tests that we are taking this semester. Yes. The option to CANCEL A FINAL EXAM. We voted silently. Someone voted against cancelling it. Everyone is pissed. Well, almost everyone. I can't fathom why someone would do that; I don't care how they did on the tests we have already taken, we had the once-in-an-undergraduate-career chance to cancel a final exam and it slipped out of our fingers.
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What if getting off of Facebook permanently is actually=gaining back part of real life? (As opposed to what it feels like, i.e. losing connection with all of the people on my friends list. The fear is unfounded and ironic= I fear that I will lose all my friends, while the reality is that I will get them all back.
Do you remember what it was like to have a crush on someone but not be able to find out everything about them just by hopping on a computer? Do you remember what it was like to see people in real life, and then not see them again until you saw them again in real life? I mean, to not even have the option of seeing someone's likeness apart from holding a photograph of them in your hand? Do you remember that?
Privacy-based issues apart, I am beginning to grow exceedingly wary of Facebook. I think it's ruining our lives, and I think that's not being dramatic at all. I think more than a little bit is at risk. I think we are addicts (even if you don't spend much time on it at all), and we can find any reason to justify our addictions, i.e. we tell ourselves that there is nothing wrong with living on Facebook. We live on Facebook. Simultaneously, our real lives, the ones that actually go places, do things, and meet real people, these lives got bored, fed up, and walked out the door a few years ago. And then we wonder why we are spread so thin and we wonder why our little brothers and sisters are socially handicapped. They'll never get to go to summer camp and have a crush on someone for 6 precious days... and then never see them again. They'll never know what that feels like. And that sucked. Saying goodbye to that girl sucked. That hurt was a feeling, and it was real. Now, we don't even know the hurt, we don't even know real; all we know is a computer screen and a desperate search for feelings that we've been told exist in aforementioned computer screen.
Compare the satisfaction of opening up your Facebook home page with initiating the first step in one of your favorite non-necessarily electronic-based activities, i.e. picking up the guitar or tapping the soccer ball onto the pitch or turning on the oven or fill in the blank. There is most likely no contest between these two levels of satisfaction. So, answer this: Why? WHY do we do this to ourselves?
The situation is hard to decipher because there is no bad guy. Facebook isn't the bad guy. And YET I still posit that, even if you don't perceive yourself to be addicted, something is still wrong. Something doesn't feel right.
And Facebook isn't the only problem, clearly. We are addicts. I don't care if I sound like a... 50... 60... damnit! Even 70-year-olds are on Facebook, no doubt. So I don't care what I sound like. All I know is, we are dying inside, whether we know it or not, and it's the internet that's administering the kiss.
And I want to choose who I kiss.
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I am aware of the irony of writing the above on an internet blog and posting it on... Facebook. I am also aware of the myriad benefits of the internet, perhaps even more so than others who have not lived far away from loved ones. But the internet doesn't need to be defended. Reality is the underdog here, folks. Living a real life and doing real things without phones and computers, this is/is becoming a lost art.
Still, I am trying to reconcile these benefits and the reality of our situation. I still feel confronted with a choice, and the conviction with which I meditate upon the situation builds and cuts deeper and deeper into my heart, and it resounds in others when I tell them about it, and I simply find myself incapable of believing that I have to/it's okay to live as a cyborg for the rest of my life.
So perhaps this is where I put my foot down.
Like the title: We make our own beds. We should be willing to lie in them.
What if we were the age-group that got fed up and started fighting to live our real lives again?
This all got started because of a girl.
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Here's another benefit of the internet: You get to listen to this song:
