Tiny addictions in daily life

Just watched the movie about Facebook yesterday, and have been frequently checking Facebook everyday since I joined two years ago. And I start today's post with repeating Facebook 3 times in two sentences, how sympathetic is that? Instead of praising David Fincher's new film, I start to retrospect my addictions in my life so far. Why they are so dominant? What influence caused by them?

Overwhelming information comes after the development of media,such as TV,internet. It results in that people of my generation grew up and now living in a environment filled with stimuli. This environment deconstructs the hierarchy of knowledge by making information more transparent, but it also brings temptation and distraction. My friend Sylvain used to describe himself as a cat,which is most easily distracted creature in this planet, when he sits all day staring computer screen browsing websites without doing any productive activities. Thanks to the development of social medias.This situation is getting more serious and normal in daily life. Take myself as an example, whenever I sleep in, feel guilty, and depressed, I would spend whole day reading through all the status update of my friends, and jumping back and forth between my email and messengers. I wouldn't say it's totally waste of time, because I did have quite a lot good conversation with friends through messengers, but most of the time, it's just another perfect excuse to escape from the reality. So constantly checking email and social medias becomes one of the tiny addictions in my life, tiny but dominant. Tried once to deactivate my facebook account, but it didn't last long before I start again. Fortunately, I start to use it in another way, more using it than controlled by it.

Another strong addiction is not digital at all, it's the strong dependency on tea. This habit started from I moved to Glasgow one year ago. The first impression is my friends in UK always ask me "Do you want some tea?" when they want to chat or hang out. The next thing discovery is that I fall in love with the taste of earl grey, and it becomes an irreversible process of being obsessed by tea. I almost forgot the taste of water until one day I realize the color of my tooth are changing into brown rapidly because of tea. Therefore, I try to reduce the amount I drink in one day recently, hope to reach the balance again soon.

The final addiction worth mentioning is TV series. This is the ultimate monster which rules my daily life. From Japanese Tv series to recent True blood, Hellcats, Hung, and Doctor Who. These bad boys have one thing in common, they all set up perfect hooks in the last 5 minutes of each episode. And it's almost unbearable that I have to wait for another week to know what's going to happen. But the worst situation just happened when watching Doctor Who, because I never watched it until last week, and it has so many episodes since 2005. So I basically spend 2 days finish the 1st season without doing anything else last week, Luckily, I stopped. Only because I noticed that this habit generates an useless emotion in my new life, and it's literally eating me, cannot afford that.


I guess everyone has different addictions in their lives, and also different ways of dealing them. In my opinion, addictions are part of my life, it's not necessary to kick them out absolutely, but do what I have to do first, then, enjoy some relaxing moment among addictions. It might be a better way for me to deal with them.

lost in translation

Still remember attending a documentary screening last year arranged by birds eye view. In Q and A section,the female Chinese director addressed her career as a writer in UK. She started to write her debut novel with her broken English, and it turned out to be one of the best seller which is supporting her film making career financially.

I've never read her novel, and I don't remember her name anymore. But to me, it's the best example of the fascination of different language systems. Mandarin is my mother tongue, in which I can express myself clearly and efficiently. As a vehicle of though,it is the most dominant one which help me to make important decisions in my life. As to English, I started to learn when I was 10, but it's totally different story, the translation mechanism always takes important part. In most conditions, I start with a thought in Mandarin, and translate it into English, then finally speak out or write down in English.

However, things have changed a lot since I moved to UK and studied my master degree. Communications in English are so frequent and instant. This situation gave me hard time in the beginning, it was more like a elementary student, me of course, trying so hard with limited vocabulary to speak to university students. And I turned this frustration into a short film-"Language Solitude." (see above) After bearing with this status for one year, I feel more natural and easy to talk or write in English. It seems that translation from Chinese is not as dominant as before,that is to say, there's a English Logic in my mind now, how amazing is that! Therefore, I create this blog. With constant writing, hopefully it would help the "English me"grow , really look forward to see where it would take me and how my personally developed through learning language.

To whom might be reading, feel free to give me comments and also correction of my broken English. Cheers.