Everyday I put a number into the Emacs diary entry to rate my daily learnings and mood. Gnuplotting those numbers for the passing week clearly shows I was on a downside of productivity cycle. Though Excel files piled up on my office desktop, I was just wanting to find people to chat with on Meebo. Plenty of random thoughts kept running in my head when commuting, but I had no way to circle them in and transform them into action or productivity. No Mac is by my side, nor iPhone and BB. I did have a notepad, but no pen to write with. Gosh! Watching wakeboarding at Mozart Coffee became not interesting at all, and the only motivation of sitting there for the whole lunch was that I could call friends to talk about the Big Bend staff and freely think about the last time I picked up my toy SLR. When back home and wanted to clean my OS X system and update the apps, I was only able to find its departing. Scripts hacked up in the winter break are there doing everything, but a half year of non-geeky life makes me forget all these cute robots and what they are actually doing. Technology was distracting me. Even knowing I passed the qualify exams was like nothing. I just can’t believe Lucas’s theory that people only want to pay tiny for eliminating cycles, though he was talking about macroeconomics while I am thinking about mentality.
Bad things are also all around on my GReader. Shanghai Stock Market plunged again and forecasts said oil price might reach $175 at the end of the year. The economies are also on the downside. The author of Marginal Revolution speaked with an expert on the Chinese banking and finance system and asked him what were the major problems with the Chinese banking system. The expert replied, “Well, housing prices are falling and many banks have bad loans and if prices fall much further the borrowers won’t have the money to pay the loans back.” Remember the subprime crisis? It’s not kidding. “Also, contra the U.S. the Chinese Central Bank is reducing the growth in the money supply to combat inflation. Interesting times.”
I was wondering at what time my mental “Central Bank” could pull me up when some sentence helped me. “我们平时还不一样，背负太多东西，到头来发现重要的就那么几样。” Ironically, it’s also from GReader. What also helped was Oprah Winfrey’s Stanford commencement speech. It was quite different from Steve Job’s 2005 one, but similarly valuable. Sometimes, random thoughts are too annoying, we just need to follow our heart and do whatever makes us feel right. Sometimes we are caring too much about every detail of every direction of our lives. Too long is the to-do list. Too much information is there on the internet. Too many pieces of news are “unread”. Too many stories are on everyone’s blogs. Too many games to follow and too many restaurants needed to try. The reason that we find many things out of control is simply we are caring too much and controlling too many, but not we are incompetent or incapable. So I decided to miss some moments this weekend. Forget about highway, forget about beer, forget about poke, forget about fb, and temporally forget about the loooooong to-do list. Good sleep really helps. Sharing ideas with friends felt good. Little cute Aaron became more and more handsome. Opened my firefox, discovered that 36lou.org was on progress. Also done the personal blogs staff for Aceman and Corn. Hey, everything’s back now, and I love this weekend.
