Selected Rants from High School

I

What kind of life is this?

What do I even leave the house for every day? I don’t earn a cent but spend a few. I haven’t learned anything, and what I have learned has nowhere to go. What am I actually doing? Why? For whom? These three questions leave me blank, drain every ounce of strength out of me. I always feel like I’ve already collapsed, accomplished nothing, amounted to nothing.

Fuck physics. I don’t understand a word of it, and I don’t want to. Fuck chemistry. I don’t understand a word of it, and I don’t want to. Every science teacher runs class overtime. Every science teacher is completely humorless.

Today Lint and I went off on Chinese-language education. What’s the point of learning all this classical prose and poetry? Because it’s “our culture”? But is force-fed, exam-rape-style education actually respect for that culture? Why not just admit you’re whoring under the banner of art? Teach us something useful instead. They taught us the three elements of fiction, what a novel is. Nobody learned how to actually write one. We study classical prose and poetry, and still can’t write classical prose or poetry — and even if we could, what would be the point? Even if I wrote another Dream of the Red Chamber today, there’d be no market for it. The times are completely different now.

Chinese-language education is completely out of step with the times. It serves nothing but the exam. The characters we learn are obscure, the grammar we learn is ancient, the essays we study are either political or written by dead people. Essay writing comes with a word limit, a required format, a required topic, a required conclusion — the only thing left unregulated is the posture you write in. For argumentative essays, you’re not allowed to argue from the opposing side. Some things that look like truths simply can’t be argued at all — like opening an umbrella just to fold it right back up. Studying Chinese, you lose your imagination. Even the basic ability to just address the matter at hand is deteriorating fast.

Students have gone frigid on writing. The moment an essay is assigned, every face falls. It’s become the last item on the homework list. It’s become “save the pain for last.” Try a little humor, a little exaggeration, anything remotely creative, and the feedback is either that you’re writing nonsense, or just: “Can’t tell what you’re trying to say.”

Chinese class is a subject that defies reality, entertaining itself, and it’s going to keep going like this forever.

II

Today I got a whim to go check my old Sina email and look back at my past self. Logged in and found nothing but ads — all my old emails, gone. There was one notification email from Sina, telling me that since I hadn’t logged in for 90 days, the system had automatically wiped my inbox. (Extremely foul language omitted here in the original.)

So say one day I go to Africa, or some country with no internet access, and I’m gone for three months. I come back, happy, log into my inbox, and find nothing left but ads from the last few days. All the letters back and forth with friends and lovers — gone. Even the trash folder — gone. What am I supposed to do then? All I can do is regret not using Gmail.

Sina Mail doesn’t even run on https. Completely unsecured, entirely under surveillance. The auto-forward feature costs extra — you have to upgrade to VIP. Fuck your VIP.

A classmate of mine once had his entire Gmail account deleted, because he never used it — no new mail coming in, never logged in — so Google deleted it, probably figured the account was being evil. That I can understand. That inbox was dead. But my Sina inbox is plenty alive — all those ads, plus notification emails from tunecore.com, proof of life right there. Ignore it for three months and it “helps” me by wiping itself clean. Thanks so much on behalf of your company for erasing my memories. Actually, I should probably thank the country first.