自強街87號

I once met a friend named Maria. She told me a story of her own, which was almost unbelievable:

This happened when she had to undergo a knee surgery after falling down on the ice and breaking her left knee. Waking up in the hospital, she noticed a nurse come into her room with quite a light-hearted smile, crooning a popular melody. "Good afternoon, Mrs. Green.", she greeted. Maria found awkward and thought to herself: "Why did she call me Mrs. Green?" "But I'm not Mrs. Green," Maria replied.

"Yes, you are, my ma'am. You've just had a stomach option and need to take some medicine now, as the chart at the bedside reads, ok?"

Chapter 16, Explaining Creativity (2006), Sawyer, R.K. 原著

I yearn for a group,  a clique, a fraction to belong to, formally, but worldly. You may say that I am covetous that after I found the final destination and meaning of journey of life, I'm still usurping willfully a stage, not necessarily a podium, lol, to present my authentic experstise, which though I'm not so sure about, for the One I serve, along with those ones He loves. To wit, if I realize in what direction I am to head for, it would be a pitiful waste of time if I still have no idea how to start off. What is being arbitrary? What is being wayward? What is of compliance? Which is the pristine Oracle? Well, I've done this part at last, 'merely' at the age of 40 or so. Now, what is left is the drilling part in the recruit training for the layman, I wonder, especially for a janitor at the department of military unit of worldwide deity army.

The janitor would like to have his uniform well ironed, make right his gears, and then stand out with rather straighter his backbone, to declare instead of to allege that his job goes well with his calling, not squandering a bit the talent his master granted him long before, not dissipating too long a while his energy onto what is counted as puny trifles, nor in annoying, presumptous preciosity way, thumbing nose at those fking feminist proselytes. I wish just to do my part well and left the rest to my boss, even though I have not passed the training course in the meantime. My uniform? Furrowed. My gigs? Rusted. And the legacy in me? Dormant. The enterpreneur would say since that I knew the spirit of this behemoth Konzern and the opening offered to me. It would be the problem of my own to fetch the right kind of handy gear and have my underwear laundried.

This summer is no vacation, and my vacation is no summer, to me, rather a toil and challenge. That's why I don't bother to conjure up a goal or aim to do something great, not to mention an innocent reverie.

First time I felt perplexed as Mom suffered her usuall but irregular bellyache this time, which has always been regarded as some kind of unimpressive gastrointestinal uncomfort. Quite a presentiment surged in my mind that mom should better be under some examination. It is weird to ache so often and so acutely like that.

Formulae Unicus

A. A Helping Hand:

If there should be a person that I will envy, it must be a "he" with many gifts. First, why must it be a "he"? In a ralatively conservative society like ours in Taiwan, girls have too many no-gos and even taboos for them to justify themselves to be as agile as boys. When they do, they would be considered to upstage the boys,  wouldn't they?

Besides, he is gentle and courteous, not like those chaps who know nothing but hold a 24-hour sit-in, blockading the whole main traffic artery all the time. He must be a person of erudition, which refers to be adept at multiple catagories to present a wholesome and profound aspect of life. (After all, I am an enthusiast of humanism.) Language, arts (especially instrumental playing, such as piano), sports (especially golf and martial arts), logical deductive thinking, and skills of negotiation are the prime "five elements" for me to be a qualified - qulified for being worthwhile taking a trip around the journey in this life - humble human being, who dares tell others how wonderful and elaborted our cosmics might be. Last but not least, he also has to have an open heart; a tender mind eager to reach for his true love in his life, and he never compromises! How valiant a man to pursue for the real meaning of love! Only when people are surrounded by love could people understand to love. And only love is the very incentive for humans to exist in the world, generations after generations.

What Is Failure?

Dear Father,
I think you already knew why I have to write you in person this time, instead of talking to you face to face. Well yes, I'd like it to be a bit more formal, formal enough to express my disappointment and confusing, and in passing make a complaint against those f#$% college professors abusing me brutally.

Sean O'Hair played a brilliant round of golf and even summoned the strength and determination to tie it up at four under going to the 18th hole against Tiger.  

1.

老師，你好!

Cici’s Homework

Here are the answers of the reading questions in the end of your novel:

From this day on,

I am not only Chris;

It is Teacher's Day today, a "typhoonful" day, which granted me generously a class-free break; I like to write something closely related to teachers, and I don't think there would be anything which is closer to teachers than blackboards at classrooms.

As far as we know, the first teacher who wrote on classroom walls was the Reverend Samuel Reed Hall (1795~1877), an innovative educator and minister who is said to have first written on a peice of dark paper when teaching a mathematics lesson in Rumford, Maine, in 1816. Later Hall moved to Concord, Vermaont, where, it is believed, he had the plaster in his classroom painted black. Soon, many other teachers, following Hall's example, painted plaster walls or plain boards black to create a visual teaching aid. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, enameled walls and then slate boards dominated American classrooms. Hall, who is also credited by American historians with inventing the blackboard eraser and with intrducing many other educational innovations, has been honored by the state of Vermont with a memorial in Concord bearing the inscription including the words "pioneer in the use of the blackboard as a schoolroom appliance".

This is a true story happening in England when a famous writer of the best-seller "God, where are You?", Rave Zacharias, took a stroll with his wife.

One day a terrible storm hit their community near Buckingham Palace with no mercy. The wind brought down thousands of trees, yes, I mean thousands of them. But there was one thing Ravi was quite confused. All the trees brought down were so tall and thick yet with roots amazingly short. He didn't realize a thing about it till he discussed this with some of his friends: the reason why the trees there had so short roots was the underground water layer in the region was very close to the surface, so close that the roots didn't have to reach down so deeply to absorb water. And that's exactly why these thick trunks looked strong and chunky but with so short roots, which would never persist the heavy blows of storms. That's why they were all down, even after maybe hundreds of years' growing, all but in vain.