I had planned to write this in Ulysses, but the copy I have is pirated and would not let me create a new file. Then my system started doing something odd: it restored settings I had not touched—wallpaper, app order, groups, all of it. I still have not updated the OS. Part of the reason is practical: I have not found a place with stable Wi-Fi and a download speed above 500 KB/s. Part of it is my own tic—I keep thinking a system update should really be a clean reinstall. So I ended up in a Windows 7 virtual machine, writing in Word 2013.
Why not write directly in the backend of my personal site? The GFW deserves the credit. Restrictions have been tight lately. I used to be able to load Gravatar avatars on the site, and I even added a caching plugin, but it still could not get past the GFW. That is only one side of it. WordPress itself pulls in a lot of resources from outside the country, so the admin area opens painfully slowly. I was too lazy to turn on a VPN, and the campus network is unstable anyway. Local writing was the practical choice. On OS X, the Office I use is pirated too, and I was not sure the auto-save was reliable, so Windows 7 won. All this preparation was not because I thought the essay needed a secure bunker. It was a way of showing the piece some respect.
This is not a year-end summary. I have forgotten much of what happened this year, and I had not written anything in a very long time—unless the English essay from the CET-6 exam counts. I remember writing a recap when I first built my site and winning a scarf from Nuffnang; I have no idea where that scarf went. This year, by late December, I still had not worn a scarf. It may be the first warm December of my life. Around this time of year I always think about the monthly journals I kept when I was younger. I had so much energy then. Now that energy is not there. Life is not dull, exactly, but I have lost the urge to record it. I still write the occasional private note that no one else reads. But a once-a-year piece like this needs to be written and put out there. My site has been running a long streak of technical posts, and it is time for a different flavor. I will probably post this to Qzone too. I barely use Qzone now, but this is my zodiac year—the benmingnian—so I will leave it to fate.
The actual year, then.
In January, just after New Year, I took the graduate entrance exam. I was completely unprepared, and the result was no surprise. I took it in Pingdingshan, and since I had been reviewing at home, I did not feel much exam tension in the days before. It was more like I somehow wandered into a test. Without much surprise, it went worse than the last time: more nervous, worse condition, worse result.
After the exam I went home, did not rest for more than a day or two—I forget exactly how long—and then went back to Zhengzhou and to the company I had been at before. I stopped thinking about electrical engineering altogether and threw myself into working as a front-end designer. That was the title the company gave me; whether I deserved it is a separate question. I also went to the company annual party. It was a fairly free stretch of time.
Because of work, it was the shortest Spring Festival I have had. I do not remember which day of the lunar calendar I crawled back to the office. I still got a few red envelopes, which made me a little embarrassed. After the holiday the days grew warmer. Every day on my way to work, I thought about whether to change cities and find another job. The first place I thought of was Shenzhen, because it was warm, and Zhengzhou still felt cold. Then I thought of Shanghai: better development environment, more to learn, plenty of strong developers. I thought about all this while working. Some people left the company, and it suddenly felt much quieter. I had plenty of work, but it was not challenging or new, and I was not learning well.
Later I was told there might be a second-round interview for the graduate program. I had made it to that stage the first time too, and then got cut. My second preliminary exam was worse than the first, so I assumed I had no chance of qualifying; even if I did, I would surely be cut again. Still, I prepared seriously for the interview and went to Chengdu early to get ready.
April was anxious, surprising, and relaxed. I got my first camera, bought online in Chengdu. I went to a comic expo, wandered around the city, and took some completely unskilled photographs. Around April 10, after nearly half a month in Chengdu, I went home. Because of the leave limit, I stayed home less than two days before going back to the company.
Finally I did not have to worry about work, but I still wanted to do something meaningful and learn something. The picture in my head was beautiful. In the end I drifted along at the company for a while, decided I should find something to do, quit, and went home.
I thought about redesigning Chayu Fanhou, but I only really got to it in the busier second half of the year. I also wanted to redo the site theme and homepage—I have a habit of changing it once a year—but I still have not done it. I wanted to build a new site too. While I was still at the company, I bought a .yt domain. It was much more expensive than a .com, but fewer people register them, so I bought the short domain all.yt and built a text-sharing site called Weimingti, or “Untitled.” That was one of the scattered online gains of the year. Back home, my undergraduate laptop could not keep up with daily use, so I retired it. I wanted a particular computer but was waiting for the price to drop, so I bought a desktop first and let it accompany me through a summer in which I truly had nothing to do. I played League of Legends, SimCity, Need for Speed, Call of Duty, and Assassin’s Creed. I watched some American shows, movies, and animated series. At the end of the summer I got the computer I had been waiting for, and my fighting spirit came back, but technical limits kept me from producing anything valuable. Then I contacted my advisor and got ready for school. For a while I was quite excited—it was my first time studying outside the province.
I arrived in Chengdu— “Gaydu,” as people sometimes call it—and things went smoothly enough. I joined the graduate student association and met a group of friends. When I had nothing else to do, I mostly stayed in the lab. It was a bit like the network studio I had in undergrad: I would stay until late, then go back to the dorm after lights-out. Here the lights do not go out, but I often entered the dorm to the sound of a hometown roommate’s snoring. The dorm was rundown and had no heating, which is another reason I was trapped in the lab. As for academics, I would rather not say much. I was never made for studying. I did a project and completed some very shallow tasks.
In December, Chayu Fanhou got its redesign. It took only a few days, but I finally cleaned the site up a bit. I kept thinking about reinstalling the server’s operating system—too much junk had accumulated—but I also felt I did not have enough time, so I let it go. Then came exams. Several of them were depressing. At least I now have only three required courses left.
That is roughly what I can remember of the year at this point, apart from today.
Today is the last day of 2014. There was no graduate exam, no final exam, no class. It was not a holiday, but it felt like one, because the two days before had been an English exam and a major-course exam, and I had gotten up after seven both days to eat breakfast. I could not take it anymore, so today I slept until after eleven. It felt great. There was no food at home, and I did not want to go out, so I went to the convenience store, bought some things, and went straight to the lab. I watched the rest of a photography post-processing course I had started yesterday. I bought the course with a friend; he likes taking photos too, but we still have never really gone out shooting together. Yesterday I watched The Taking of Tiger Mountain. I had also seen Gone with the Bullets and Love on the Cloud. The Taking of Tiger Mountain was great fun, though compared with Interstellar it still is not what I would call a good film. At least it was not another movie about fighting Japanese invaders, which felt fresh. I saw a wildly enthusiastic review that I had to pass along, if only to add some positive energy to this post: “The Taking of Tiger Mountain is fantastic 😍😍😍 @LinGengxin @TongLiYa are even better. After watching it, I thought about all the martyrs who shed blood and sacrificed for the country we have, and how they still had to make revolution in weather that cold. I love my motherland even more 😭😭😭😍 We should cherish the peaceful life we have now.”
I cleaned up the spam comments on my site. When I opened the backend, there were thousands again. I thought about redesigning the site, but that is a 2015 task no matter how I count it. I renewed the server through 2017, the year I will finish graduate school. Time should pass quickly. The site has been around since 2011—four years now—and a lot has changed. Chayu Fanhou, in particular, is now on its seventh redesign. While sorting through the site’s history, I felt quite a lot.
That is about all. A yearly summary is not a bad thing. Still, I pray that Qzone and Moments will not once again be filled with a selfie plus “new year, new self.” What is a new self? I have never understood. Being a new self every single year sounds terrifying.