I miss her. I missed her who sleeps whenever she feels like to, crawling into the bed cuddling her favorite stuff animal and wondering off to her seamless dreams. The one who loves lifting her head up just to look at the starry night; the one who heartly feels the sensitivity of life.

After all, she's still there. Like what she always does.
and after all, it's a quiet and lovely night.

It's the same old sickness, cold and sore throat, and every time, i get sick, i feel a little bit down. Don't like to talk. Just want to lie down and sleep, but there is so much work waiting for me to finish. This week, i got four essays in total, power-point revise, and prep for upcoming stats test. sigh.

4th period class is usually dreadful, especially when it rains. Even sitting in the most spread out room in the basement, listening to the wind escaping from the outside, the dim light and distant side conversations make everything listless. Yet there's this centre of attention, accumulated within the crowd of people that are always there. Not that I am not interested in English literature. In fact, I used to be described as "her development of critical analyses was in step with her enjoyment of reading, and her efforts at understanding more serious works of literature merely coincided with her natural curiosity for learning." by my former English teacher, who's truly humorous and knowledgeable.  As for the current situation that I have a different teacher, whose style and standard of teaching and motivation for students' learning are somewhat differ from what I enjoy. By disputing or providing our own interpretation or understanding towards a book or any other literature that being taught in class, we might be getting a low grade for that matter. Acting and writing accordingly kills the creativity and interests in pursuing the mere happiness that lies in the simple action called reading and thinking.

Special love to my dearest mommy.
希望您永远健康与快乐.
^_^

With this hand I will lift your sorrows. Your cup will never be empty, for I will be your wine. With this candle, I will light your way into darkness. With this ring, I ask you to be mine.

Book Excerpts

The police are pretty good at pinpointing approximate time of death in recently dispatched bodies. The potassium level of the gel inside the eyes is helpful during the first twenty-four hours, as is algor mortis -- the cooling of a dead body; barring temperature extremes, corpses lose about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit per hour until they reach the temperature of the air around them. (Rigor mortis is more variable: It starts a few hours after death, usually in the head and neck, and continues, moving on down the body, finishing up and disappearint anywhere from ten to forty-eight hours after death.)

Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.

I almost finish this fine book.
Here's a little book review from JHU's online resource.
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/henry_james_review/v026/26.1flannery.html

I am reading this book The World is Flat lately, which is written by Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist of New York Times. The book covers several important and radical changes that brought the world into a flat platform, which is even more amazing knowing that the different sourcing means and the unprecedented idea of free intellectual exchanges. The globalizing reform is huge and gradual, which becomes the reason that most of us hardly ever feel a thing until someone points it out. However, people get irritated by those sudden changes. Personal saying, I just reformatted my computer and I still didn't get quite used to it. Since, the desktop, the icons and even the internet browser setting are slightly different than what they were before, I had a pretty hard time seeing myself fitting into these unfamiliar stuffs. Although, I had my way around it after I gave some time to it.

Things are getting out of my hands. The only thoughts and struggles left are subconsciousness. To be or not to be? It's always a classic question.

         I'm already tired enough, but I still insist on finishing recording my life for today. My friends in Shanghai are all taking the College Entrance Examination at this time now. Sometimes, the time difference just make me feel so distant. I hope they all do well on the tests. Mr. Zimmerman, the teacher in charge of the Columbia Mentor-Mentee Program, took us to a movie and a dinner afterwards today. We watched the Pirates of the Caribbean. It's can be categorized as the same kind of movie as Spider Man 3. They all involved actions,  magnificent scenes, famous and familiar characters. They are both the third movie in each series. Actually, I'm a person that will like movies such as "Enchanted" and "Ratatouille". Ha, it's not even a word, someone might certainly made that one up.

Cultivating a Spot

Pick one spot in the city and begin to think of it as yours. It doesn't matter where, and it doesn't matter what. A street corner, a subway entrance, a tree in the park. Take on this place as your responsibility. Keep it clean. Beautify it. Think of it as an extension of who you are, as a part of your identity. ...

Go to your spot every day at the same time. Spend an hour watching everything that happens to it, keeping track of everyone who passes by or stops or does anything there. Take notes, take photographs. Make a record of these daily observations and see if you learn anything about the people or the place or yourself. ...

I stayed after school today and took the living environment mock regent. The test was so boring and I was very already tired by the time I got to 6th. Period. Even my 8th. period teacher asked me if I was feeling ok. Then, she told me not to put too much pressure on myself. At that moment, I really didn't know what was I supposed to react. I am just tired, even though I slept pretty well at night and went to bed quite early lately. Is that because I got up at 6 every morning? Maybe I should get myself coffee tomorrow morning on my way to school.

After taking the test, I got out and Richard called my name from that little Deli store in front of the main gate. He still doesn't want to admit that I'm a junior. Ha. Very funny that the freshmen do have their schedules on them. I don't even know where I put the schedule at. I said "Only freshmen carry the schedule on them." I know that this comment is some kind of mean. Then, we started this whole Junior-Freshmen debate. Oh, one other thing. Nicolas finished the test so fast, almost 40 minutes earlier than I did.

I dislike the music of CSI that I download, but I'm fond of the music from final fantasy. The Jazz Piano is so great.

Happy Birthday to Reehen.

DDR@05/21/07 3:15 p.m. Computer lab on third floor

        All right, maybe many of you don't think this could be a thing to be mentioned, but to me, I couldn't wait any longer to get to the summer holiday. Even though, I have 5 regents in June, which are U.S. History, Global History, Chinese, Maths B, Living Environment, and tons of things to do over the Summer, it's still more fun to do whatever I want to do without the pressure from school, without facing teachers and running through the packed hall way and always trying to avoid bumping into other people, which is kinda of enjoyable as someone might found. I am one of the luckiest, since my classrooms are all very close to each other, not like some people I know that they have to go from this side of third floor and go down to the other side of basement in 3 minutes. Yes, we only have 3 or 4 minutes between classes. Anyway, I was supposed to come here and talk about The Awakening, but I haven't finish reading it yet.

Jonathan Swift
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Swift

He's also the author of Laputa (格列佛游记)

#
    She turned back to the piano and began to play once more, and Jamie smiled. "Soave sia il vento," may the breeze be gentle, the breeze that takes your vessel on its course; may the waves be calm. An aria more divine than anything else ever written, thought Isabel, and expressing such a kind sentiment too, what one might wish for anybody, and oneself too, although one knew that sometimes it was not like that, that sometimes it was quite different.

#
    There was a brief pause, and then the buzzer sounded. Isabel pushed the door open and began to climb up the stairs, noting that stale, slightly dusty smell which seemed to hang in the air of so many common stairs. It was the smell which seemed to hang in the air of so many common stairs. It was the smell of stone which has been wet and now has dried, coupled with the slight odor of cooking that would waft out of individual flats. It was a smell that reminded her of childhood, when she had gone every week up such a stairway to her piano lessons at the house of Miss Marilyn McGibbon --- Miss McGibbon, who had referred to music which starred her; which meant she was stirred; which meant she was stirred. Isabel still thought of starring music.

   She paused, and stood still for a moment , remembering Miss McGibbon, whom she had liked as a child, but from whom she had picked up, even as a child, a sense of sadness, of something unresolved. Once she had arrived for her lesson and had found her red-eyed, with marks of tears on the powder which she applied to her face, and had stared at her mutely until Miss McGibbon had turned away, mumbling: "I am not myself. I apologize. I am not myself this afternoon."

#
    Isabel suspected that the way men behaved towards women depended on much more complex psychological factors. It was not a question of moral knowledge, she thought; it was more a matter of confidence in self and sexual integration. A man with a fragile ego, unsure of who he is, would treat a woman as a means of combating his insecurity. A man who knew who he was and who was sure of his sexuality would be sensitive to women's feelings. He would have nothing to prove.

    Toby seemed confident, though; in fact, he oozed confidence. In his case, at least, it was something else --- perhaps the absence of a moral imagination. Morality depended on an understanding of the feelings of others. If one had no moral imagination --- and there were such people --- then one simply would not be able to empathize with them. The pain , the suffering, the unhappiness of others would not seem real, because it would not be perceived. There was nothing new in this, of course; Hume had been talking about much the same thing when he discussed sympathy and the importance of being able to experience the emotions of others. Isabel wondered whether it would be possible to communicate Hume's insight to people today by talking about vibrations. Vi
brations were a New Age concept. Perhaps Hume could be explained in terms of vibrations and fields of energy, and this would make him real to people who otherwise would have no inkling of what he meant. It was an interesting possibility, but like so many other possibilities, there was no time for it. there were so many books to write --- so many ideas to develop --- and she had time for none of it.

#
    the title had caught her attention, largely because of the topicality of genetics --- which formed the background to the problem --- and because of the problem itself, which was, once again, truth telling. She was surrounded, she felt, by issues of truth telling. there had been that article on truth telling in sexual relationships, which had so entertained her and which had already been commented upon favorably by one of the journal's referees. then there had been the Toby problem, which had brought the dilemma into the very center of her own moral life. the world, it seemed, was based on lies and half-truths of one sort or another, and one of the tasks of morality was to help us negotiate our way round these. Yes, there were so many lies: and yet the sheer power of truth was in no sense dimmed. Had Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn not said, in his Nobel address, "One word of truth will conquer the whole world." Was this wishful thinking on the part of one who had lived in an entanglement of Orwellian state-sponsored lies, or was it a justifiable faith in the ability of truth to shine through the darkness? It had to be the latter; if it was the former, then life would be too bleak to continue. In that respect, Camus was right: the ultimate philosophical question was suicide. If there was no truth, then there would be no meaning, and our life was Sisyphean. And if life were Sisyphean, then what point in continuing with it?
 She reflected for a moment on the list of bleak adjectives. Orwellian, Sisyphean, Kafkaesque. Were there others? It was a great honor to a philosopher, or a writer, to become an adjective. She had seen "Hemingwayesque," which might be applied to a life of fishing and bullfighting, but there was no adjective, so far, for the world of failure and rundown loci chosen by Graham Greene as the setting for his moral dramas. "Greene-like"? she wondered. Far too ugly. "Genneish," perhaps. Of course, "Greeneland" existed.

#
    There's such a thing as premature forgiveness, because a lot of nonsense was talked about forgiveness by those who simply did not grasp (or had never heard of) the point that Professor Strawson had made in Freedom and Resentment about reactive attitudes and how important these were --- Peter Strawson, whose name, Isabel noted, could be rendered anagrammatically, and unfairly, as a pen strews rot. We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without htese reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn't matter. So we should not forgive prematurely, which is presumably what Pope John Paul II had in mind when he waited for all those years before he went to visit his attacker in his cell. Isabel wondered what the pope had said to the gunman. "I forgive you"? Or had he said something very different, some thing not at all forgiving? She smiled at the thought; popes were human, after all, and behaved like human beings, which meant that they must look in the mirror from time to time and ask themselves: Is this really me in this slightly absurd outfit, waiting to go out onto the balcony and wave to all these people, with their flags, and their hopes, and their tears?

#
    And yet there was an awful fascination in the prospect of seeing Minty up close, as one viewed a specimen. She was an awful woman --- there was no doubt about that --- but there could be a curious attraction in the awful, as there was in a potentially lethal snake. One liked to look at it, to stare into its eyes.

#
    "All you have to do is watch people," said Isabel, as they arrived at the front door and she reached forward to the bell marked Hogg. "People give themselves away every five seconds. Watch the movement of eyes. It says absolutely everything you need to know."

#
    In general, and this was quite against the conventional wisdom, men did not like to hear that women found them attractive, unless they were prepared to reciprocate the feeling. In other cases, it was an irritation --- burdensome knowledge that made men uneasy. That was why men ran away from women who pursued them, as Jamie would steer clear of Minty now that he knew; not that she would regret Jamie's keeping well away from Minty. that would be an appalling thought, she suddenly reflected: Jamie being ensnared by Minty, who would add him to her list of conquests, a truly appalling prospect that Isabel could not bear to contemplate. And why? Because I feel protective of him, she conceded, and I cannot bear for anybody else to have him. Not even Cat? Did she really want him to go back to Cat, or was it only because she knew that this would never happen that she was able tot entertain the thought of it?

#
    She made a conscious effort to put the thought to one side, as one should do with all fears. Living by oneself it was important not to feel afraid, as every noise made by the house at night --- every squeak or groan which a Victorian house made --- would be a cause for alarm. But she was feeling fear, and she could not suppress it. It was fear which made her go into the kitchen and turn on all the lights, and then move from room to room on the ground floor and light them. there was nothing to see, of course, and by thte time she went upstairs, she was prepared to turn these lights out again.