On the topic of living life without regret

An excerpt of the recent blog entry of Wu Di that I was alerted of:

Tuesday, November 04, 2003 3:03:48 PM

(from my best friend, Jiang Ying)

Dear Wu Di,

As I type the email address of ophenia@hotmail.com, I am reminded of you once telling me that you don't want to use the name "ophelia" directly because she died early, and that you don't want to be short lived like her. This practical bourgeois sentiment seems to have evolved into some nobler and more exciting notions. I'm very much excited for you as well as afraid for you. You may laugh at me, but you are becoming an archetypal individual who thrives in the razzle-dazzle of city with no close, down-to-earth friends, no intimacy, nothing but boredom and the vulnerability of feminity. I'm not condemning you in any sense, but I hope more than anything else that you would not let your depression stop you from considering rationally the consequences of go with the heat of moments. A game of intimacy is very hard and hurting to play. Please do not keep the thoughts of your wild fantasies with you. My thoughts are mundane, that's why I worry about you. You are great, but if you sink with a fantasy, you become an archetype; if you triumph without stain, you are extraordinary.

Yours forever,

Jiang Ying

Re:

蒋莹，你真不愧是我第一个“最好的朋友奖”获得者。回想当年那段“迷路”的日子，很庆幸自己没有像你讲的那样堕落下去。So I did find my way out of that maze of life. I may not be extraordinary yet. But thanks for being my friend for all these time. Maybe, because of your letter 6 years ago, I will be extraordinary one day. I almost want to call you right now( until I realize it’s already 1 am). Hahahah, maybe your bf will be jealous. But I want to say I love you a lot and I hope you know that.

I must say it really does bring up some of that ticklish sauce that makes one's heart thump, mouth go sour and eyes sting. And it does makes me want to write, write and write again just like a long time ago, when writing wasn't a regime of terror for correctness; write despite the horrible informattability of blogger.

(and yes, I remembered correctly that Justin's friend, who just passed by the office, is another one of the guys who are wearing checkered bermudas this summer)

What can I write about? I've always been most comfortable with reflective-styled writing. Then I stopped, because I'm guilty of being too inwardly directed, as if being so is like being selfish. What, do I care about no one else except myself? Is my own world the biggest and only? You - spoiled and ego-centric and undeserving princess! Grow up and enjoy the world! Then again the clerk who wrote Notes from the Underground didn't sound younger than I am, and Dostoevsky definitely was not. Then again again, what is a diary for if not for "reflections"?

One of my dreams is to get a taste of the artists', the Bohemian life. I have decided that this will always be one of my more or less secret fantasies that will eventually dawn upon my children, just like Naomi Klein. After all these years, I could still recognize, and FEEL, the ache behind my own letter (so nicely disguised that it's at most one of those adorned and inscrutable letters women wrote to each other in classic Victorian literature) - that of the inability to get a taste of the very degeneration I was carefully stepping around, of a circle of wild, unrestricted friends who stimulate the intellect of the imaginery (vs that of the physical and existent). There'll always be flights of craving for the unstable, destructive and dramatic. (At least I shall always be proud of the fact that Keke was a result of the above cataclysmic forces.) I won't linger though. Just a taste is enough. But only when I have gone out too far and spent too much in the cold and the barren. Then I'll willingly get back to the normal and predictable.