They say Aquarius is extremely calm, extremely rational. But somehow, come summer, I turn sentimental. Maybe only warm sunshine and scorching heat can melt a heart of cold, glassy stuff.
Only when summer arrives each year do I suddenly feel like a living creature. Every year, my personal emotional eruptions happen in this blazing summer — the days when school lets out for vacation.
Lately I’ve been feeling down, tinged with a faint sadness. I’ve realized I’ve wasted so much of my youth and accomplished nothing. Right now my biggest wish on the work front is to build an interesting game product.
I’ve never liked being bound by the things around me, ever since my school days as a kid. I could be home all alone, keeping company with my computer day and night, sowing seeds of words in my notebook — anything but submitting to the spoon-fed education at school.
All through college I did a lot of social practice every year, piling up plenty of flash development experience, all by my own effort.
— Speaking of which, the sad part is that my one and only fabricated social practice (giving a policy presentation at some hospital) earned me an “Outstanding Social Practice**“, while every bit of my real social practice (the IT stuff, flash websites, etc.) was completely ignored by the school authorities. This kind of topsy-turvy irony happened again and again on campus. After seeing it so often, I’ve grown detached and calm. Everyone else is drunk and I alone am sober — you guys can go screw yourselves.
If only I could have run into a group of like-minded people at school and formed a team — how happy that would have been. But in that restless campus, every club tied to arts or tech made me feel that meeting them was worse than never meeting them at all. Birds of a feather really do flock together, and every time I was left alone staring up at the sky.
Fighting alone — is that my fate, kid?
My last internship before graduation, from the second half of ‘08 to the first half of ‘09, brought me briefly together with a group of idealistic young IT people in Shanghai. After a few months on the job, I noticed that because the company’s human resources were so weak, a big chunk of my time was being wasted on back-end development. That wasn’t my personal direction, so I chose to leave early.
Living under someone else’s roof, it’s hard to find a wise lord.
I ran off to Shenzhen — new place, new opportunities, so many chances right in front of me. In the end I chose to develop two idealistic virtual communities. Only after joining did I discover how many obstacles stand in the way of a team with severely insufficient resources trying to get something done. The lack of manpower stalled every bit of progress. Low-level doers made communicating hard for me and drained enormous energy — even the simplest thing took ages to explain. The lack of funding made the manpower shortage even worse. That’s when I truly understood that everything idealized is just the daydream of school days when you don’t have to worry about food or clothing. In reality, no normal person can pin their future on an idealized product when they can’t even keep themselves fed and clothed.
For a while, I lost myself in my work, unable to find my own value.
The slow progress on the Shenzhen project has to be reined in somehow. So I’ll leave first. As long as the remaining development follows my original plan, the project will gradually get finished. Let my share of the salary go to more coders.
Once again I’m about to set off on a long journey. Even the cat understood my situation and went off early to find herself a new home. She left softly, just as she had come softly, descending from the sky and departing to the sky. The magical cat Wind became a legend. I believe she has a pair of magical wings that carried her to her original longing — a warm, sweet home with an owner who could look after her at every moment.
In the blink of an eye, it’s July again.
To me, July marks the start of summer, because what I looked forward to most as a kid was summer vacation starting on July 1st — the sign that carefree days had come back. The blazing sun, lively classmates, scorching concrete, badminton downstairs under the broiling sun, drenched in sweat sharing homemade ice cream, hiding in an air-conditioned room wrapped in blankets with a group playing cards…
Summer vacation, get-togethers — days like that will never come back, will they. Alone, roaming the world as I please; a thousand sails have passed, and the four seas are my home. I look up and heaven and earth meet — boundless desolation. Suddenly I feel that true freedom is also loneliness.
Five years chasing dreams like a moth to the flame. Who in all the land will be crazy with me?
This is my 21st summer, still a summer of fighting alone.
Who will come to ignite me, grant me warm sunshine and wings, to soar through the blue sky and find the home of my dreams on the other side of the sea?