Year Three, Almost Free 5: Circe and Tim's Birthday

Hello, Tim!

Sorry that I have not been as active as I used to be, but with the college entrance exam in mind, finding time for all my entertainment is no longer as easy as squeezing water from a soaked sponge.

The sun was still there, basking the lands of Taiwan with its welcoming warmth, but with the winds and rain in the week, the temperature has slowly lowered; I think the weather for thin jackets are soon to come.

Circe, Witch of Aiaia

There are a million ways that I could have finished this book long ago. Chucking my cell phone away, ignoring my studies, bringing my book with me wherever I go despite the recent rainy weather, and etc. However, I couldn’t have done all of them, for (quite sadly,) I’m also quite a cell phone addict; I have my studies to take care of; I wouldn’t risk having my books get in contact with even a small drop of water.

Here is what I do instead. In my diary, I remind myself every day that I am supposed to spend thirty minutes reading, however busy the days are. It worked even though there still are days I would be too tired to take in anything. Just yesterday, I finally finished reading my first book since the summer break.

Circe, a book written by Madeline Miller, the author of the life-changing The song of Achilles, is a book about a witch that was portrayed as more sinister than not on the epics of the Greeks. The instant I saw the book on the Internet as well as the reflective metallic orange design and the elegant, sleek black used to entwine with the color on the cover that makes the book shine with luster, I knew then that I would need her in my shelves.

Aren't they beautiful?

Circe in the original myths was more of a jealous and vengeful sea spirit born to the sun god, Helios. She turned a man she loved to a god by accident, and intentionally turned another sea spirit into a sea monster because the man Circe loved left her for the sea nymph. The sea monster, by the way, was an infamous Scylla. The men at sea feared her for gulping down six of the crew in a swift motion every time you go past her.

Afraid of her new-found power in witchcraft and to where lied the extent of her capabilities, the gods exiled her to an island where she could interfere with the lives of no one unless people found their way to the island. According to the original myths, Circe was practically fuming when escorted to the small island of Aiaia and turned all the ship members washed on shore into pigs until she was defeated by Odysseus and served him and his crew for a year before they went on with his thrilling expedition for the way back home.

In the retelling version of Madeline, however, focused more on the reasons or the events that led the once naive sea spirit on the path she later took. Yeas, Circe was a character with a flawed personality, and it seemed dangerous for the others that she possessed such an unmeasurable power. She did transform Scylla into a monstrosity that we all come to know from the myths, but in the novel, she never stopped mourning for the lives lost in the ferocious jaws of the monster she created, ‘Those men she had eaten were sailors as Glaucos had been, ragged, desperate, worn thin with fear. All dead. All of them cold smoke, marked with my name.’ She perceived the world unsuccessfully, for she was practical and outcast to the whole world. She unveiled the ugliness of the human world the hard way and hence the rather cynical perception she held for the world.

The author, Miller, writes about love like she was carving words into stones, wrapping it up with a generous amount of prose. Her previous work painted a picture of love between men so heart-wrenching I had buzzing in my head. Circe, on the other hand, is a book in which she portrayed more of the love a mother holds for her son. How much one could do just to kept one’s child safe: Setting herself in front of a goddess so that she couldn’t take him away; staying sane even if the kid wails about the world for seven incessant years; willing to suffer eternal pain and torment just in view of providing the infant further protection. I knew the weight of it all, all the toil that must be taken into responsibility, and how much love it takes to endure and to eventually let go, but I think it was just because I don’t have a kid of my own yet that I don’t know how much it would relate to a parent.

Before reading this book, I was convinced that Circe was just a witch working by a cauldron, satisfied with her power, cackling while plotting to turn more men into pigs. Madeline Miller’s works on Greek mythology never fails to cask a different light on the heroes that originated from the Greek eras. Just like she did with the swift-foot Achilles, I fell in love with the character of Circe.

 

This has officially become my favorite leisure activity.

End

I would like to elaborate more on the week that I had, but I apparently had no time.

Sorry, this is all I could ever muster.

Tim: Happy Birthday! Here is my digital birthday card as promised! I have to say that I am never good at designing things, but I do wish you take care of yourself even though you have such a tight schedule now.

Bonne Anniversaire! Have a happy year as a happy seventy-year-old!

 

Extra: Mom with her new-knitted shawl.

Best wishes,

Hugo

Year Three Almost Free 4: Studying at School and Becoming a Monster

Hello, Tim!

This week was just like any other, filled with new understandings of my surroundings. Schoolwork's still time-consuming, but we have grown more or less familiar with this routine.

Eight-to-Nine

Being a student of Zhong Zheng, I have a unique privilege that I have never thought to exercise until last week. Last Friday, Allison and I paid the school library a visit and applied for a permanent seat in the library. As long as you stay at school until nine o’clock three days a week, you get to have a seat of your own in the study room. You can keep whatever you want on the desk: your books, a pillow to make your chair more comfortable, a mug which you sip coffee from, etc. This offer has always been available for everyone in the school, but since I used to live so far from school, I never consider myself getting home after ten thirty almost every day.

Now I have the distance advantage as well as a company, I didn’t have to hesitate to apply.

A spacious room.

Allison and I got seats directly behind William and Jay, who already have been studying there for weeks. In the spacious room, every seat is evenly distributed an ample amount of freedom. Our desks are about one and a half arm wide, and it was quite long as well. Between desks are also a vertical board that blocks the vision from the left and the right, just to keep out the potential distraction from your surroundings. In the quietness of the room, willingly staying in a place devoid of much commotion, I could focus on the schoolwork I was supposed to finish and was able to finish a lot of revising more than I could ever do at home. About an hour passed, and I had started to feel a bit fidgety. I was about to lose the grasp of my attention as if I was grasping on the wobbly margins of a precipice with only one hand, loosely hanging from the cliff, just one blow from falling.

Then I looked to my left.

Allison was sitting right there, poised and absorbed. Her head lulled slightly to the right, taking in the words presented in her handout, hands working fast and precisely when she saw some bullet points that are more important than the others. The door opened and entered a student who came back from a water bottle refill, and Allison didn’t even flinch, even though she was just a desk’s distance from the door. She would occasionally sit back in her chair and look at me with exhausted eyes, mouthing the words for ‘so tired,’ and she would turn back to her desk, gaining focus like she never lost it.

How could I simply throw in the towel when I saw such a devotion next to me? Partly challenged, partly motivated, I willed the pen back in my hand and watch what the hieroglyphs in our textbooks had to say for themselves.

For three days in this week, I did it, not losing (too much) focus in three four-hour studies.

I guess I still have some determination after all.

Friday Kids Day

It has become official; Friday evening has from now on renamed as ‘take two kids out to a park and wear yourself out’ day. Staying out after nine basically every day, Mom especially asked me, voiced her words with confidence, knowing I wouldn’t say no to the request, that I would have to come back on time on Fridays so that I could go to the park with Sophie and Aiden. ‘You know I can never catch up with their nimble movements,’ my mom added matter-of-factly.

It was indeed the truth, though.

I walked along the road back to Sophie’s house, already dreading the massive amount of physical movements that were so imminent. A bead of sweat slip from my sideburns as I imagined myself sitting in the shelter in the air-conditioned reclusive studying room at school.

The bright side of all this evening was that I could learn something from the two little bunnies every time. When we were walking on the sidewalk, one of the kids was taking me by my right arm while the other was tugging on my other. Both were demanding to have my attention, wanting to tell me some ‘anecdotes’ they came across at school. The two kids both wanted their chance to talk, and it confused me more with Sophie’s rapid-fire sentences with an occasional query for me to see if I really understood, and Aiden’s inability to finish a sentence as efficiently with a lisp but never stopped trying.

I then bent over to the height of them, explaining to them that I couldn’t understand either of them when they both want to talk to me at the same time (with some wide gesticulation) and asked if they were willing to wait for their turn to speak. To my delight, they seem to understand, and albeit Sophie looked a bit impatient when Aiden was relating a story of a police and a ghost kid, she didn’t complain that much.

The travail started in the playground. Sophie wanted to play her version of tag which she named “The Big Monster,” and when she appointed me it, I inferred from the name of the game that I was supposed to be a big pernicious monster. I managed a growl, flexed my fingers as if they were some weird, monstrous claws, and then ran after the kids in whatever scary way that came to my mind.   I must have looked like a distorted version of a bizarre monster, for the kids shrieked and laughed when they tried to evade me. 

I took a picture when they were taking a break from all the running.

The commotion got the attention of the other kids on the playground, and two of them were brave enough to ask if they could join. You know the old saying, “The more, the merrier?” Well, the kids didn’t have to know the proverb to execute it! In no time, there were four little kids in their one-digit ages running frantically, hopping up steps of stairs, and evading from a monster wannabe under the moonlight and the dim and dangling street lamps. One kid we didn’t use to know stayed along and played with the kids a little longer. She had a slightly darker complexion than our two children, and she was wearing a fitting pastel blue dress with ice cream cones on it. She was very shy, and you could see the obvious conflicting gears working in her brain, unable to decide if she wanted to join us. She did eventually, and her parents even thanked me for including her! Being extenuated apart, I had immense fun when playing with the kids.

A girl joined the game (sorry for the quality)

Water fountain show in the evening.

 End

I have perhaps talked about kids and parks for numerous mentions up until now, and maybe I won't be talking about it for a while until something worth bringing up in the future.

Extra: Moon Festival family gathering

Sincerely,

Hugo

Year Three, Almost Free 3: Matthews and School Life

Hello Tim!

I know that at the time a typhoon swept by our coast, nearly hitting us but still bringing a considerable amount of rain and wind, there is also a hurricane (which is basically the same thing) hitting the coasts of America. Is Arizona in anyway affected by the storm?

Keeping a Diary for the Second Time in My Life

Yes! I’m keeping a physical diary again! The last time I did so was over two years ago, for more than three hundred consecutive days. I stopped writing them when I was about to graduate from junior high because I was too lazy. Last week, I remembered having my hands flying across the paper, writing about whatever I could think of. I would dig one of the books I wrote, full of colorful words (I used a different color every page) and you would see me sitting in the corner of my study, sometimes smiling at how goofy I used to be, cringing when I wrote about an awkward event, and a scowl forming when I spot some grammatical mistakes.

I then thought about how forgettable I can be at school. I have forgotten to bring papers needed at school; I would forget to bring them home (some would totally mistake me with a goldfish in a bowl- I’m as forgetful as them). I thought about how I would spend money with no intention of stopping but never really remembering where and how I had spent them. I dawned on me that I could just start writing diaries again! One day, Allison and I went to a stationery store to look for a small notebook- I don’t want it too big or I would end up spending too much time writing entries every day. Exasperated at my indecisiveness, Allison grabbed a palm-sized black notebook with dozens of lined pages inside; It was perfect, as I found out later. Its size was big enough for me to write about two to three events or how I felt per page, but not so big that it would take more than five minutes to write. On the other page, I could write a to-do list as well as a record for the money I had spent and how much I had had left. It’s extremely portable because of the petite size it has.

I named it Matthews. I know that it sounds weird, naming a diary, but is it really that normal just to start every entry with ‘Dear Diary?’

Volleyball is Back!

I believe the whole EHP loves the PE classes. This semester, we will have our own in-class sports tournament, in which we all compete against each other in fixed teams of four or five, and our semester scores will be determined upon the outcome of our long-term tournament only. For first, we have volleyball matches, which is one of the few sports I have learned to be decent at. I don’t know why we still call it autumn in September in Taiwan; It feels as hot as it is in summer! But still, I wouldn’t imagine myself saying this a few years ago, it feels nice to run around and sweat and have fun on occasion. The volleyball tournament last semester changed.

My teammates for the semester are Vivian, Cathy, and Patrick, and we have played against team William (teammates: Allison, Candy, and Otto) and team Selena (teammates: Angela, Sherry, Amy, and Jay) so far. We luckily won Selena’s team and only lost to William by a couple of points.

PE classes have never been so fun.

Our sunny volleyball court

Eric and Some Afternoon Tea

This Saturday, I arranged a small rendezvous with my German teacher Eric. He just came back from a two-month trip abroad with his wife, and I wanted to discuss with him the continuing of my German classes. It might be a lot to juggle when you put the big exam into the equation, but a juggling on languages is something I am always up to; it can also be a source for stress relief to an extent.

Eric also brought me to a French pâtisserie that he has constantly been recommending me to visit. The owner of the dessert store, Cherry’s Café, is a Taiwanese family. The daughter was said to have grown up in France but speaks Mandarin well. However, they are moving or closing for good at the end of the month due to complicated reasons.

Eric conversed with the clerk in French while all I did was say ‘Bonjour,’ ‘Je m’appelle Hugo,’ ‘Oui, je suis lycéen; J’ai dix-sept ans.’ It was not all that hard, but when you really are engaging in conversations in a language you just learned, you would find yourself lost for words. But for the rest of the time, I listen, and I found that I could understand about 60% of the words and 80% of the context. The café was full because it was raining outside, so Eric asked the clerk how much longer it would take for us to have seats while she answered ‘in about five minutes.’ He ordered two lemon tarts, a cup of Americano (my first cup in a week!), and a black tea for himself. He then asked whether they really are closing the store, and she answered that maybe they will move to another place. These are the moments that turned out to be the proof that shows how much I love different languages; maybe I’m not as fanatic as Melvyn is (I think he’s learning Japanese in Spanish now), but I have my own pace.

A creamy lemon sauce that has a distinct scent of cheese... This is the best lemon tart I have ever had!

End

Sorry for not being so respondent, Tim, but these days are just either too tiring or too busy.

Our next mock test will be in December, and before then, there will be a lot more studying.

Extra: Parent's Day

Sincerely,

Hugo

Year Three, Almost Free 2: New Phone and Blood Donation

Hello, Tim!

This week, as mentioned before, was a week of tests. Along the way, several things also took place, and here are some stories worth bringing up as the highlights of the week.

Replacement of my Phone

As one may recall, my previous phone lost its sights (with its malfunctioning lens for the camera feature), and I got a temporary replacement from my grandfather. Our initial plan was to use it until I have saved up enough money to buy a new one, but one day when I was just hanging out with Eliza at her place, she told me that she got a new iPhone because her last one got a cracked screen. Her mom then sent it for repair and said that it would be mine when it came back. Now, I am familiar with second-handed phones, so I was cool with that, for the cracked screen apart, it was said to function perfectly, and it indeed was.

This is my first Apple phone, so there are a lot of features I need to get used to, but products like this mostly are willing to cooperate with me, so I think I will be fine.

Blood Donation: Complete

Finally! I never knew having your blood taken away for altruistic purposes needs three times of visits. On Sunday, I mentally checked all the factors that could lead to a red light before I could get a needle in my hand, blood draining away from me, and the eventual third tantrum in three consecutive weeks: I should have over than eight hours of sleep, ample nourishment, no drug or alcohol abuse in history, no antidote or other immunizing injection in the past year, no male-and-male sexual encounters and so forth. I filled in the now-familiar form and was soon given a blood pressure test. The doctor who later assessed my health condition exclaimed at the 155 (whatever the measurement could be) blood pressure I got. She gave me a second blood pressure test and it came back a much lower 122. I think maybe I was just too nervous about the blood pressure machine. The band wrapped around just squeezed and squeezed and it felt like a snake coiling up on my upper arm, busting out the blood flow of it. A double check on all the questions on the list followed, and I was finally given the green lights I have been applying for over three weeks! Blood donation, here I come!

I washed my arms so that the place that would soon be needled was sanitized. A nurse then led me to a room full of black armchairs. With a practiced ease, she soon had the rubber rope tied on my upper arm, stuck the needle and attached the needle with numerous tubes and containers. A stream of dark red appeared on the other side of the needle, flowed into the tubes, and into the blood bags. This was my first time of donation, so I could only be drawn out 250 milliliters of blood. Maybe it was just the cold limb I had due to the loss of blood, the tube placed in contact with my skin felt like the warmth you would get when you sit next to the furnace on a snowing night. Wait. Silly me. Blood IS hot!

I was silently singing 'let it flow, let it flow, let it flow' then

The nurse told me that normally it would take about ten to fifteen minutes to have a bag full of blood drawn out, but for my case, I think it took me far less than ten minutes to get off the armchair. I was then introduced to the free food bar where I grabbed a soy milk as a reward for myself. It was a new experience; who knew that blood donation could be so fun? I knew that I would be back in two months. That will be when I’m going for the 500mm blood donation!

Too bad I had coffee in the morning.

First Mock Test

Last Wednesday and Thursday were the days of our mock tests. The results have yet come in, but we already have all the answers.

Starting this year, students won’t have to study all five major subjects anymore. All you have to do is aim to master four of them. I chose to let go of my horrible Nature studies as it includes subjects such as physics and science and biology. To me, they are just such hard nuts to crack I would be banging my head on the table for hours if I had to try understanding the subject.

I did better than I thought on my Mandarin and Chinese Literature, and a necessary high score on English, a passable number of points on my social studies, and a horrible score in math.

Math, to me, is and always have been a wild card. You feel like you comprehend the question and what methods or what formula you should be using to crack the questions, but I could never put two and two together and sometimes it would leave me exasperated, knowing that I was just one step from getting the right answer. My math score would have to rise up in time for the big exam or it would not mean well for my college choice.

End

These days have been days with horrible weather. Rain pouring down in buckets, flooding everywhere (unfortunately, not our house) and a pending typhoon named after a mountain plant was pending and coming for us.

Let’s hope for the best.

 

Extra: Grandma's birthday this Saturday

Sincerely,

Hugo

Year Three, Almost Free 1: Little People in a Park and School Started

Hello, Tim!

This... is the first week of school, and we were all suffering from some serious Thursday Blues.

School

What is utterly atrocious about the third year of high school is that, barely a week into the beginning of the semester, we are already faced with our most dreaded nightmare: mock tests. We have to take three mock tests in total throughout the semester before the final, but between the three mock tests, we would also find just another three monthly tests, which are the midterms and the finals. With six major tests in our way, we apparently need some time to be mentally prepared.

Let's have a look at our class schedule for this semester!

This is just a picture of how our schedule looks; it showed which subject we would have every day, from eight in the morning until five in the late afternoon.

I don't know the reason for this, but for this semester, we got more subjects that would take up two consecutive periods, essentially making them into several two-hour classes, like the geography on Thursdays, and the history on Mondays.

This was only the first week, and the 'fun' had just begun...

Kids and Parks: Bad Choice

What would a kid want to do in his/her free time, given that any sort of electronic devices has been listed as off-limits?

Going out and have fun, of course. Sure, go have a ride on that elephant slide; give the swings some velocity and just glide against the wind; straddle that seesaw and let gravity weigh you down while the other side with some other kids you lift you up with their opposing weight.

All those sounded absolutely cheerful and childlike, carefree and liberating.

It wasn't. I'm not saying that it wasn't fun, but when you have two kids with you in a park, you can wear yourself out pretty fast.

Several footsteps into the park across the road from our house, a row of monkey bars stood there in the dim, low lights. Sophie, who was very proud of her gymnastics skills, kept climbing up the highest bars and 'politely asked' (No. Try 'demanded') that I join her up there. She seemed to be constantly trying to compete with someone who couldn't even hang on the lowest bar (which was me, by the way). I think these are the few occasions she thought she could do better than I can, and she just couldn't let that slip.

The girl was like a little monkey.

Meanwhile, Aiden, who was still not able to climb the bars because he was too short was impatient. He kept dragging me, asking me to join him at the swings. After many a minute passed, I went with him. He just couldn't swing high enough on his own (he was only four or five, so it was really normal), but then with a drastic mood shift, he stormed off and sulked away in a dark corner of a slide. Maybe he just hated that there were so many things that were out of his control, so many things he couldn't do even if he really wanted to. That explains the running thing later on.

To bring Aiden out of the gloomy disposition, I invited him to a footrace, wanting to let him have some confidence. He bit the bait like a little fish and started running at his highest speed while at the same time cutting the tracks to make it back to the finish line faster. I accompanied him for another two laps around the small circle, hoping he would be willing to sit and rest for a while. But no, he didn’t. He kept on running and running, lap after lap no matter who attempted to stop him. I finally couldn’t catch up with the high density of energy of kids, and just sat at the small stone lump by the track. I barely had the time to take several slower breaths, Sophie was back on the monkey bars again, asking me to lift her up so that she could sit on the bars, which was later followed by several requests of action she wanted me to do on a monkey bar, which, in retrospect, were only for the purpose of hearing me admit that I couldn’t do it. Kids.

He just went on and on and on.

What I had learned from this was that you have to regularly take kids out, unleash them in some safe place and just let them roam around and spend some energy. If you let the power pile up and formed mountains, you wouldn’t be able to keep up with them.

Now, I have to tend my overly strained arms and legs.

Yet Another Failed Blood Donation

I am so infuriated at the system of theirs.

Last week Sunday, I went to a blood donation bus only to find out that you can’t have a dentist’s appointment one week prior to the blood donation, which was on the 23^rd of August. Visiting the blood donation center on 9/1, Saturday would guarantee a fast pass. It SHOULD HAVE been like that.

IT TOOK ME AN HOUR TO COME ALL THE WAY OVER HERE!

With a simple ‘Mister, you still can’t donate blood’ made the one-hour trip nothing. As it turned out, in their system, the last time I had a dentist’s appointment was on 26^th of August, SUNDAY, which was the day I visited the bus, and it was just nonsense.

I was visibly upset and indignant all the way back home, and no, this time, there was no ice cream consolations this time.

NEXT WEEK IF I STILL DON’T HAVE MY BLOOD DONATED, I WILL

Keep trying until it was finally possible.

(I don’t know! There is nothing else I can do!)

End

This is the conclusion to the week’s letter. I am still not sure whether Ms. Lin will restart the whole newsletter thing, but the chances aren’t really high. It was a pity, true, but nothing will stop me from keeping on writing!

Yours truly,

Hugo